We've Come to Take You Home

by Susan Gandar

  A door opened. A cup and saucer was put down on the table in front of her. Kelly asked if she was all right and then said that her mother was on her way to the hospital. The door closed. Silence.

  She lifted her head and looked around. The walls of the room were white. To her right, where she would have expected to see a window, there was a blank wall. She looked down. The carpet under her feet was a dull grey and she was sitting on a dull grey sofa. There were two armchairs, the same dull grey, one on either side of the sofa. Hanging on the wall to the left of the door, was a picture of a blue vase containing pink flowers. The flowers were roses and the vase was standing on a shelf in front of an open window. Beyond the window was a sun-filled garden.

  Directly in front of her was a low table. On the table was a large box of paper tissues and the cup and saucer. She picked up the cup and took a sip. It was coffee and it was cold. What had seemed like seconds had, in fact, been minutes.

  Voices and footsteps, the tip, tap of heels, getting nearer. Her body tensed. The door opened.

  ‘I got your message and went straight home and you weren’t there.’

  It was her mother.

  ‘Then my mobile rang and it was the hospital and–’

  ‘Would you like something to drink, Mrs Foster?’

  ‘Coffee would be lovely, thank you,’ said her mother.

  The nurse, called Kelly, turned to go. Sam wanted to go with her, to run away from this room without a view, but the door closed and she and her mother were left alone.

  ‘What happened? When I went out Dad was fine…’

  Sam didn’t know what to do: whether she should sit, whether she should stand, say something or stay silent. Everything she did, or didn’t do, would be wrong.

  ‘And he was talking and walking, not being sick, and he didn’t have a headache…’

  Sam searched for words but with the words came pictures, and neither the words nor the pictures contained a single scrap of comfort. She was back crouched down beside her father, where he lay, barely breathing and unconscious, on the kitchen floor. She could hear the tick, tock, tick, tock of the clock, getting louder and louder, hammering its way inside her head. And she was praying and she was crying for the ambulance to come.

  ‘Hello. I’m Dr. Brownlow.’

  He looked no older than some of the boys at her school. But he was smiling.

  ‘Please do sit down, Mrs Foster.’

  Her mother took a half step towards the other empty chair, hesitated and then sank down next to Sam on the sofa.

  ‘Mrs Foster, we suspect that your husband has had a subdural haematoma, a form of intracranial mass lesion. It’s likely to be acute rather than sub acute, or chronic, but until we do a scan we won’t know for certain. The scan will take place, here, at the hospital, as a matter of urgency, as soon as your husband’s been stabilised.’

  He paused to re-load.

  ‘Your husband has been transferred to the intensive care unit on the top floor. You’ll be able to go up to see him soon…’

  ‘But how, why, did this happen? Was it because of this morning, the car accident, the knock he received on his head?’

  ‘Mrs Foster, the answer to your question is almost certainly yes, but we won’t be able to confirm that until we’ve had the results of the scan. We would have liked to have kept your husband in, under observation, just in case, but as you know he refused…’

  There was a tap on the door. The doctor jumped to his feet.

  ‘Kelly, here, will look after you.’

  The door closed, and he was gone.

  ‘Two coffees?’

  Kelly placed the two cups and saucers down on the table. The door opened. The door closed. And, once again, Sam and her mother were alone, sitting side by side on the dull grey sofa, both staring, fixedly, at cups of dull grey coffee.

  ‘If I’d known I would never have gone out. Maybe if I’d been there…’

  Her mother being there, at home, wouldn’t have stopped any of this happening. The ‘just in case’, which everyone had been so worried about, had happened. Sam stood up.

  ‘Sam, are you all right? Where are you going?’

  ‘I need the toilet.’

  It was a lie but she had to get out of that room.

  ‘“I have some bad news and some very bad news.”’

  Two men, one tall, one short, were sauntering down the corridor towards her. The tall one had long hair. The short one had none. Both were wearing identical security guard uniforms. It was the tall one who was doing the talking.

  ‘And the patient said, “Well, you might as well give me the bad news first.” And the doctor said, “The lab called with your test results. They said you have twenty-four hours to live.”’

  The short man snorted. The tall man continued.

  ‘“Twenty-four hours! That’s terrible! What could be worse? What’s the very bad news?” The doctor said, “I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday.”’

  A door down the corridor, to her right, had a ‘Ladies’ sign on it. Only one of the three cubicles was occupied. Sam turned on the tap. She leant over and splashed cold water onto her face. There was a rustle from inside the cubicle and then a click. The door opened. A girl dressed in black walked out of the cubicle. She was crying. Sam turned round.

  ‘Are you…’

  There was a flash of red, blue and silver, and the girl was gone.

  THIRTEEN

  May 1917

  GAUNT - FACED, SUNKEN - EYED women and children stared out of cottage doorways as the horse and cart creaked down the hill towards the church. Her mother sat in the front, dressed in the frayed black mourning dress that had been passed down through the family, from mother to daughter, for as long as anyone could remember. And now it was her mother’s turn to wear it.

  She had put on the dress the morning after the post boy had delivered the letter telling them that Jess’ father had been killed in action. On her lap she cradled a tiny white coffin. A funeral was nothing new. So many children had died and so many children, young and not so young, some the same age as Jess, had been buried. Her brother was just one more.

  He had taken over a month to die. Day after day, night after night, he lay there in the bed, disappearing into himself. His breath, at first loud and harsh, gradually became quieter and softer. Then one day, when she woke up, she was aware that the shrunken little body lying in the bed beside her was no longer warm. It was cold, stone cold. Her brother had passed away in the night when she and her mother were sleeping. The cause of his death was starvation. That was two days ago.

  A man, his body bent and twisted from polio, bowed his head as the horse and cart creaked past his cottage. Two children, one girl, one boy, stood on either side of him. His wife, their mother, had died in childbirth the year before. After her death, he’d sent his son and daughter to the local children’s home thinking, now they had no mother, it would be the best place for them to go; they would be better looked after there than at home. Jess remembered the hugs and kisses, the tearful goodbyes, at the end of their last day at school.

  A month later and Harry and Clare were back. They’d run away from the home. But the two children who walked into the playground were very different from the two children who had walked out. They’d always been stick thin, and that hadn’t changed, but now their bodies, including their faces, were covered in sores and bruises.

  Hunched down at the far end of the playground, Clare and Harry sitting in the centre of the circle, Jess and the rest of the class had listened, wide-eyed, as the brother and sister described how they’d had to scrub floors, mop steps and prepare the food (oatmeal boiled up in lukewarm water with the occasional bit of bone or lump of turnip). They weren’t allowed to talk, run or laugh. They were beaten for not sleeping with their legs straight and beaten again for demanding to be called by their own names, Harry and Clare, rather than just numbers sixty-two and sixty-three. Their father let them stay at home. To die of starvation, lov
ed, was better than dying of starvation, unloved.

  The first drops of rain fell as the horse and cart drew to a halt outside the church’s lychgate. It had seen many a wedding and christening. Now it was seeing the funerals. The driver didn’t move, just sat there wrapped up in his greatcoat, slapping the reins impatiently against the quivering flanks of his scrawny horse. Anything reasonably fit, whether horse, mule or pony, had long ago been loaded onto a ship and sent across the Channel to serve with the army in France. The few that remained to plough the fields, pull the carts, or heave coal down the pits were either too old, too sick or too small.

  Jess jumped down, drawing her shawl up over her head, and ran round, feet splashing through puddles, to where her mother was sitting. Her mother slid the coffin towards her. For something so small it seemed surprisingly heavy, far heavier than when they first left the cottage half an hour ago. She supported the coffin against her stomach, leaning it up against the side of the cart, while her mother clambered down. Together, one at either end, they carried it through the lychgate and across the churchyard to where a single, black-robed figure stood, umbrella up and bible in hand, by a newly dug grave.

  ‘“I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live…”’

  The men and boys from the village, the ones who had been so loudly clapped and cheered as they marched off to war, would never be laid to rest in this churchyard. Her father was buried somewhere in France, possibly in a military cemetery or just in a hole dug in the side of a trench. They didn’t know, and might never know, where.

  ‘“And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die…”’

  At least with her brother they had something to say goodbye to. Her mother had insisted on doing it properly however much it cost. She now received a widow’s pension, and had used up most of that month’s allowance, even smaller than the one she’d had before, to buy the coffin, the grave and the hasty words of prayer that were now being said over it.

  ‘We therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.’

  Rain ripped through the graveyard sending the vicar, his black gown billowing out behind him, running back to the shelter of his church.

  They stood there, mother and daughter, shivering with cold, their threadbare clothes soaked through, the wind and rain gusting and swirling around them, staring down at the mud-splattered white coffin. Her mother pulled a posy of primroses out of her pocket. She threw the flowers down into the waterlogged grave.

  A woman dressed in a tightly buttoned grey coat, a black mourning band on her right arm, was kneeling beside a grave on the opposite side of the churchyard. The woman stood. She brushed clods of mud off her coat, picked up her basket and walked, between the rows of gravestones, over to where Jess and her mother were standing.

  It was the woman from the market, the one she’d stolen the bread from, would she say something? The woman glanced down at the coffin and then looked up. She stared at Jess, hesitated and then turned to her mother.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

  Her mother nodded.

  ‘And we for yours.’

  The woman bowed her head and walked on, past Jess and her mother, down the path and out through the lychgate.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘COME ON, JESS, LOOK sharp. He’ll be here soon.’

  She slipped out from under the blankets. The bed, which had been originally shared by four, then three, was now only slept in by two. Soon it would be just one.

  She took a sip of tea. The primroses had long gone, the bluebells were fading and the elderflowers were almost out. Summer was just a few weeks away but inside the cottage, tucked away in the valley at the bottom of the hill, the mornings were still bitterly cold.

  ‘These tea leaves are the ones I used the morning your father left…’

  The last breakfast the family had eaten, sitting together round the table, her mother bouncing the screaming baby up and down on her lap.

  ‘I dried them, saved them up for the day he was coming home…’

  Her mother stood up.

  ‘And now you’re going…’

  London wasn’t that far away.

  ‘I’ll come and visit whenever I can. They’ll let me do that, won’t they?’

  Her mother poured water from the jug into the chipped enamel basin.

  ‘I won’t have you going up there dirty…’

  She picked up a cloth.

  ‘Come on, stand over here, where I can get at you…’

  Jess walked round the table to her mother.

  ‘Up they go.’

  Jess raised her arms. With no money, coal too expensive to buy, and with only a few twigs left for firewood, having a bath, even one every two or three months, was no longer possible. A quick scrub with a piece of cloth had to do. But in the winter it had been too cold to do even that. Her mother had sewn Jess into her winter clothes in November and, she’d stayed in them, day and night, never taking them off – until now.

  ‘I met your father at the house. He delivered the vegetables, in his barrow, fresh from the market at Covent Garden. We ate a lot of vegetables, all those people in a big, grand house like that…’

  Jess winced. She wouldn’t have any body left if her mother kept scrubbing so hard.

  ‘There would be potatoes and onions and leeks for us servants, and asparagus and beans and peas, for the family, the Major, his wife and the boys. Boxes and boxes we had delivered. Didn’t know where to put them there were so many. The artichokes were the worst. Nasty prickly things, all leaves and stalk and worms…’

  Her mother rinsed out the cloth.

  ‘And in the summer we had lettuce, all sorts, floppy ones, crinkly ones, and radishes and tomatoes and cucumber. The Major was a meat man but if his vegetables were wrapped up in pastry or hidden away under a sauce where he couldn’t see them, a white one with nutmeg, sometimes cook would add cheese, or onions, cooked long and slow, then he would eat them.’

  The water in the basin was now black with over six months’ dirt. Her mother held out the cloth.

  ‘You finish yourself off, properly now, while I get your things ready.’

  Jess lifted her shift and scrubbed.

  ‘You might meet your own husband there.’

  Her mother knelt down beside the shiny, new leather suitcase sitting on the floor. She lifted the lid.

  ‘Like I did.’

  What chance did she, Jess, have of finding a boyfriend, let alone a husband? There were no young men. There were none left. They were all out in France fighting the war. Or dead.

  ‘Come on, take off that shift…’

  Jess hesitated. When she’d been a little girl she’d never been embarrassed about running around, in front of her mother and father, as naked as the day she was born. But her body had changed.

  ‘You’d best be quick…’

  She pulled off her stained and torn shift and took the one her mother was holding out. She’d never seen anything so white.

  ‘You’re a fine girl, Jess.’

  Her mother looked her up and down and smiled.

  ‘Some might even say pretty…’

  Jess pulled on the shift.

  ‘It’s scratchy…’

  ‘A couple of washes will soften it up.’

  On went the woollen dress, the black stockings and the ankle boots, all bought with the money sent down from London.

  ‘Wrap the bottom lace over and through the top lace…’

  She watched, and tried to remember, as her mother looped, knotted and tied a bow.

  Lastly, she pulled on, and buttoned, the black wool coat.

  ‘It’s so big…’

  The sleeves reached down over her fingers. The bottom almost touched the floor.

  ‘You’ll grow into it. That’s what happened, when I went up to London, to a big house, with
decent food to eat.’

  Her mother picked up the suitcase.

  ‘Get off the train and don’t move, just stay there. The Major’s a big man, big all over. And he always swings his arms like he’s marching. And no hair, even when he was young…’

  And there was the cart drawn by the horse, its head sagging, eyes rolling, ribs sticking out, crawling along the mud-choked track towards them. It was the same cart and the same horse, with the same driver wrapped up warm inside his coat, which had taken them to the church for her brother’s funeral less than three weeks ago.

  His death was a blessing. He had gone to heaven. It was the end of his suffering. This was what her mother had repeated, again and again, as they trudged, slipping and sliding in the mud, out of the village, up the hill and then down the hill back to the cottage.

  There was no heaven. At least not like the one preached about in the church on Sunday. How could there be angels with haloes and wings? How could Jesus rise from the dead? How could anyone rise from the dead? It was all impossible. How could you believe in a God, or anything like a God, with the war out in France, and all the men and boys dying, and all the women and children sick and starving?

  The one thing she could understand, really understand, was the need to feel no further pain. To be dead, to be nothing, to disappear into a hole in the ground, had to be better than spitting, coughing and vomiting your life away as her brother had done the last weeks, days and hours of his life. She knew what that was. She didn’t need the bible or a preacher to tell her. That was hell.

  But this cart with its near-dead horse was taking her away to a new and better life.

  ‘Now be a good girl, Jess.’

  Her mother hugged her tight.

  ‘Work hard and do what you’re told and you’ll be well looked after.’

  Jess slid her suitcase onto the cart and then climbed up after it. The driver flicked his reins. The cart shuddered forward. Jess turned to look back. And there was her mother, a small, dark figure, standing alone at the bottom of the hill, still waving.

  FIFTEEN