The Year It All Ended

by Kirsty Murray

‘Goodnight,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady. She didn’t look back at Martin. She crept down the stairs to lie in her narrow camp bed in the dark, listening to the mournful weeping of Ida and Mrs Alston.

  The next day, feeling dusty and exhausted, they climbed back onto the eastbound train, away from the Somme. Although they had planned to travel on to Albert in search of Louis’ grave, Mrs Alston was so patently unwell Ida had said they had no choice but to return to Amiens and find a decent hotel to allow her to recover.

  Tiney nodded. It was as if the silence of the cemeteries had entered her throat and she couldn’t find words to express any of her thoughts or feelings.

  When Martin emerged and offered to help carry their bags, she responded curtly, ‘We can manage.’

  ‘I’m not worried about you,’ he said, as he picked up the Alstons’ suitcases. ‘But I am worried about Mrs Alston and Ida. Sometimes, the thing we pray for is the thing that undoes us.’

  ‘I won’t let the thing I pray for undo me,’ said Tiney as they picked their way through the rubble at the entrance of the railway station.

  ‘The unbreakable Miss Flynn,’ said Martin. ‘But you should be careful of fractures. Grief can be shattering.’

  ‘That’s neither helpful nor encouraging,’ said Tiney.

  ‘Would you prefer I said something glib and untrue?’

  Tiney blushed. ‘No, of course I wouldn’t.’

  They stood in awkward silence on the platform until the train arrived. Martin handed their baggage onto the train and saw Mrs Alston and Ida to their seats. As he exited the carriage, he brushed past Tiney, who was standing in the breezeway, having dealt with the porter and the ticket inspector.

  ‘I’m sorry, Tiney. I was too brusque last night. I think it’s truly courageous of you to be making this pilgrimage and honouring your brother. I wish I had better connections in Albert or Tincourt that could help you.’

  Tiney softened. ‘You’ve been very helpful already. I never would have been able to work out where the Buire British Cemetery was if you hadn’t sent me your map, and I’m sure I’ll find a driver in Albert at the place you suggested.’

  ‘Will you write to me? Tell me how you fare?’

  He scribbled an address in Paris onto a slip of paper and gave it to her as she stood on the steps of the train. Tiney folded the note and put it carefully into her bag. When she looked up, Martin was already walking away but though she didn’t call his name, he suddenly turned to wave, as if he sensed she was watching him, as if he could read her mind.

  As soon as they reached Amiens they checked into the nearest hotel to the railway station and Ida put her mother to bed.

  That evening, Ida and Tiney sat at a small table in a cafe while Mrs Alston slept.

  ‘I’m sorry, Tiney,’ said Ida. ‘We will come with you to find Louis’ grave, just as I promised, but I must give Mummy time to regain her strength. I’ve telephoned friends in Paris. I think we should take Mummy there for a week or two, get her settled in, then you and I can travel to Albert together.’

  Tiney was silent for some time. Finally, she found her voice.

  ‘I can go on alone,’ she said.

  ‘No, you can’t,’ said Ida. ‘You’re only eighteen years old and we promised your parents we’d chaperone you.’

  ‘Ettie said there were women younger than me working as VADs during the war.’

  ‘That was different, Tiney,’ said Ida. ‘I’m sure she wasn’t expecting you to head off on your own. The war may be over but the peace is hardly won.’

  ‘That’s more or less what Martin said. But he was encouraging. And he has given me very good directions. It’s not as though I’ll be wandering about like a lost lamb. I know exactly where to find Louis’ grave.’

  ‘That Martin Woolf – he could very well be a wolf in sheep’s clothing for all we know. You should be careful. What do we know about him? Don’t you think it a little too much of a coincidence that he wrote to you, with no return address, and then turned up at Villers-Bretonneux?’

  ‘If only it was because of me! But he was there to see Ettie Rout, not me. He didn’t know our visits would coincide. He’s on his way to Paris to work for the League of Nations Union.’

  ‘Is he Jewish? With a name like Woolf, you can’t help but wonder.’

  ‘Stop it, Ida. Martin has nothing to do with my wanting to go on alone. When I saw you and your mother at Charlie’s graveside I understood that you both needed time, just the two of you, without me. And that I need to find Louis’ grave on my own.’

  Suddenly, Ida began to weep. ‘You won’t feel so bold once you’ve seen it. Oh Tiney, I thought it would make me feel stronger, that being able to see where he lay would heal something in me, but it only made me realise that I’m broken inside. When I saw that sad little grave, when I saw where he is, the place that he fought and died, it was as if it shone a light on a great black chasm, a horrible echo chamber that’s inside my heart, the place where all my love for my Charlie used to be. I feel so empty.’

  Tiney wrapped her arms around Ida. She stroked her hair away from her face and kissed her. She didn’t care that the waiters might see. She knew that all across France, women were weeping for their lost brothers, sons and lovers.

  ‘You go to Paris, Ida,’ she said, softly. ‘I’ll come to you soon. Then we’ll walk along the Seine together and see Paris in the spring. But for now, you have to let me go.’

  The next day, Tiney waved Ida and Mrs Alston off from Amiens station as they set out for Paris. Then she crossed to the opposite platform and sat with her small cardboard suitcase waiting for the train to Arras. She would need to travel deep into the Somme to reach the ruined town of Albert. She took Martin’s map from her handbag and smoothed it out on her lap.

  Beneath the everlasting sky

  A swirl of dust swept into Tiney’s face as she alighted from the train in the late morning. The spring sunshine was bright and warm but, like Villers-Bretonneux, the town of Albert was a landscape of ruins. Tiney remembered Louis sending a postcard from Albert of the ‘Leaning Mary’, a statue of the Virgin which had teetered on the ruined tower of the basilica, but was now lost in the wreckage of the town.

  Clutching her suitcase, Tiney made her way along a dusty path through a construction site where a dozen men were clearing away debris. From the other side of the station she could see a jumbled assortment of half-built and half-destroyed buildings. Not far away there was a line of old cars parked outside what looked like a hotel, and further down the street was a newly built red-brick building.

  Tiney tramped down to the hotel and negotiated with a burly Frenchman to hire a car to take her to Buire-Courcelles. She drew out Martin’s map and pointed to where the Buire British Cemetery was located, and the Frenchman whistled to a younger man and waved him over to study the map; then they insisted she pay in advance.

  The drive to Buire-Courcelles seemed to take forever. Once again, Tiney felt as though the silence of the battlefields had stolen her voice, and she couldn’t find any words to speak to the driver of the car. She sat in the back seat, her suitcase on her lap, staring fiercely out the window at the patchwork of fields and hedgerows. A few small boys waved and shouted as they sped past. The car lurched to avoid a farm-cart and then turned into open green fields, a landscape untouched by mortar fire and trenches. In the villages outside of Albert, there was not a sign of khaki and no flags flew, but a few German prisoners were pulling down some military huts under the supervision of a bored-looking gendarme.

  Tiney’s whole body trembled as the car drew closer to the tiny hamlet of Buire-Courcelles. Her heart hammered in her chest and her ribs ached. The old car crossed a bridge and drove past a line of simple brick and stone houses, and then the driver turned right along a narrow laneway and pulled up outside a small cemetery. A few young trees grew along its boundary but beyond were fields of green spring grass.

  Tiney climbed out of the car, uncertain whether she should as
k the driver to wait. She glanced at the quiet countryside about her. A few starlings flew out of the eaves of a nearby house. It was as if the war hadn’t reached this tiny corner of the Somme. It gave her the confidence to ask the driver if he could return for her late in the afternoon.

  At the entrance to the cemetery, Tiney hesitated. She put her suitcase down beside the gate. This was the moment she had dreamt of for more than a year. She could still see herself, sitting on the steps of Larksrest, opening Louis’ last letter. She wanted to call out his name, as if to let him know she had finally reached him. Then she shut her eyes and tried to imagine each one of her sisters standing beside her along with Mama and Papa – all six of them walking through the gateway together. The gravel crunched beneath her feet as she stepped into the cemetery, her eyes shut tight.

  When she opened them again, the cemetery seemed almost disappointingly small, so different to the vast Adelaide Cemetery of Villers-Bretonneux. The same white crosses marked the military graves, but there were civilian graves here as well. A small, weathered stone crypt stood to the right of the entry to the cemetery.

  Tiney trod carefully, as if for fear of waking the dead. She stopped before each white cross and read the inscriptions, the names of each of the fallen. And then she found Louis.

  He lay in a row of Australian soldiers who had died within days of each other. Tiney stood, very still, very quiet, before his cross and stared. She couldn’t make tears come, though an ocean of longing swelled inside her.

  ‘Hello, Louis,’ she said, kneeling down at the edge of his grave and resting her hand on the earth that covered her brother.

  Once she had spoken his name, it was as if a spell had broken. Words began to flow from her mouth, tales of everything that had happened since that long-ago day in 1914 when Louis last walked down the path of Larksrest, under the lychgate and out into the street for the very last time. She told the story of each of their sisters, as if Louis was sitting right in front of her, resting against the wooden cross, laughing and smoking a cigarette. She imagined him furrowing his brow with concern when she talked of Papa’s illness, and smiling at the news of the birth of little Ray Junior. She talked until every detail of the past year had been recounted, the long terrible months since his death, right up to her last conversation with Martin Woolf.

  When all the stories were told, Tiney opened her handbag and took out three sprigs of wattle. Each of her sisters had picked a spray of wattle to place on Louis’ grave, and though the soft yellow blossom had grown dry and faded in its journey across the world, the small buds of gold looked bright against the base of the white cross. Then carefully, tenderly, she pulled out the weeds that grew in clumps on the grave. With her fingers, she scraped a place for a bouquet of wildflowers that she gathered from around the edge of the cemetery. Over by the stone crypt, sheltered from the wind, was a cluster of early poppies. Tiney picked six of the blood-red flowers, one for each of the Flynns, and laid them in a crisscross pattern on top of Louis’ grave. Then she picked three more poppy flowers and tucked them carefully into the folds of a handkerchief. Finally, satisfied she had done all she could, she dusted her hands and knees and stood at the foot of the grave again.

  ‘Louis,’ she said. ‘Louis.’

  Her eyes began to stream, tears washing down her face. Not wanting to dampen her handkerchief of poppies, she wiped the tears away with the back of her hand but didn’t sob or make any sound. Inside her was a stillness so deep, so profound it was as if she had been hollowed out. She felt like a bell, as if the touch of another human being might set her ringing, a sound so pure and sad that everyone would weep when they heard it.

  When Tiney walked through the gate of the cemetery, it was as if she had crossed over from another world. The quiet lane, the dappled afternoon light that shone through the trees, the soft twittering of birds – all were foreign and disorienting. From very far away, she heard an explosion as if from another universe. She wished she’d asked the driver to wait. She sat on her suitcase, feeling dazed, and watched the sun sink behind the trees. But still the car didn’t return.

  When the sky had taken on an evening glow, an old woman in a white bonnet came slowly up the laneway. She wore a faded blue skirt and black bodice. She stopped on the verge beside the cemetery, close to Tiney, and then bent over painfully to cut a handful of grass. Tiney guessed she was at least eighty years old and tried to to imagine all the things her eyes had seen in a lifetime. She would have been a young girl in 1848 when Tiney’s great-grandparents fled the uprisings in Europe and sailed to South Australia. Now the old woman had borne witness to ‘the war to end all wars’. Perhaps she had even seen soldiers carrying Louis’ body into the cemetery.

  The old lady looked up and nodded at Tiney. Her dark eyes shone in her brown, lined face. She held out a fistful of the cut grass and said, ‘Pour mes lapins.’

  Tiney understood she was simply gathering grass for her rabbits. Before Tiney could think of a reply, the old lady began to walk away but then turned and limped back. She took Tiney by the hand.

  ‘Venez avec moi, ma fille,’ she said.

  Tiney allowed herself to be led down the lane to a cluster of huts. The old lady introduced herself as Madame Sentier and settled Tiney on a bench outside the hut in the last of the sun’s rays. She chatted to Tiney in French as she opened a small pen and laid the cut grass before two large brown rabbits. Night fell yet still the driver hadn’t returned. Madame Sentier came outside and led Tiney into her hut to show her that she had made up an extra bed.

  They ate supper together in silence – vegetable soup, stewed dried apples spread on chunks of bread, fresh egg, tea and goat’s milk. That night, Tiney slept as though she were a little girl again, as though the war had never happened, as though she was born to live in the country, to live quietly with the old French grandmother.

  It took three days for Tiney, with Madame Sentier’s help, to arrange another car to take her back to Albert so she could return to Amiens and from there to Paris. She was glad of the quiet days with the old French woman. Madame Sentier’s pleasure in her company was obvious, even though Tiney’s schoolgirl French didn’t lend itself to long conversations. In the evenings, they sat together by the small fire and Madame Sentier told Tiney of her family, all lost in the war, of her home in a small village on the Belgian border that was razed to the ground and of her years of wandering in search of a safe place to rest. And of how she had found peace in the tiny hut that was built for the refugees fleeing the conflicts. On the morning of Tiney’s fourth day in Buire-Courcelles, she bade Madame Sentier goodbye.

  ‘Bon courage,’ said the old woman, as she held Tiney’s hands.

  ‘You have been so kind. One day, I hope to come back to see you again,’ said Tiney. ‘Merci beaucoup pour votre gentillesse. Je ne vous oublierai jamais, Madame Sentier.’

  Madame Sentier smiled through tears. ‘But it is not goodbye,’ she said in French. ‘It is farewell. You will never visit me again. I will die far from my home, for my village is no more. But you will go and make a new world, you and all the other young ones. You must do this, little one. Remake the world.’

  Artist’s model

  Ida’s studio was reached by climbing a twisting stone staircase in an old apartment building in the Latin Quarter. The stairwell smelt of damp but Ida’s room was bright with sunlight streaming through a dormer window that overlooked the boulevard below. There was very little furniture – a narrow single bed, a table, two chairs, her easel and a clutter of art materials arranged on a bookshelf. A small, gold-framed, oval portrait of Charlie hung beside the bed, and Ida’s sketches, watercolours and small canvases were tacked up to cover the fading wallpaper.

  They sat in a patch of sunlight near the window. Ida had bought crisp bread rolls in anticipation of Tiney’s arrival, and set a jug of chocolate and another of black coffee on the table. Then she carried two small dishes, one with pale yellow butter, the other with confiture, from the makeshift ki
tchen wedged into a corner of the room.

  ‘You must stay with me as long as you like,’ said Ida. She put her hand on Tiney’s knee and smiled. ‘I never should have let you go to Buire-Courcelles without me. If I’d known you’d take so long before joining us, I would have dragged you to Paris kicking and screaming and made you wait until I could come with you. If anything had happened to you, your parents would never have forgiven me. Why on earth did you stay on in Amiens for a week on your own?’

  ‘I needed to simply sit and write letters,’ said Tiney. ‘Each letter to my sisters took me a whole day to write and then it took another whole day to write to my parents. I wanted to finish all the letters and then send them together so no one could feel left out. And I had to write to my uncle and aunt as well.’

  Tiney couldn’t tell Ida that she’d also written to Martin every day she was in Amiens. In her mind’s eye, that week would forever conjure a vision of the small corner cafe with red check tablecloths where she would sit each day, with her letter-writing folio, a bottle of ink and her fountain pen. She could see her hand moving across the paper, words pouring out of her, and a cafe au lait that she nursed all day until it was cold, as she wrote minute descriptions of the days in Buire-Courcelles and all it had meant to her. As if a letter a day wasn’t enough, she’d written to Martin twice on the day before she left Amiens for Paris.

  ‘You could have written your letters from here,’ said Ida. ‘By the way, Mummy and I collected all our mail from the Thomas Cook agency. There were some for you too.’ She jumped up and fetched a pile of envelopes from her bedside table. There were six for Tiney, one from each of her sisters, one each from Mama and Papa and one from Onkel Ludwig and Tante Bea. Tiney shuffled through them twice, unable to stop the twinge of disappointment that there wasn’t one from Martin.

  ‘Don’t open them now,’ said Ida. ‘I don’t want to lose you to homesickness. If Thea’s letters make me homesick I can’t imagine what it will do to you. We have to savour being here, Tiney. Every minute of it. Paris is beautiful at the moment.’