by Janet Tanner
“Whatever is it, Charlie?” she asked.
He pushed the newspaper towards her, stabbing at it with an eager finger. “ Haven’t you heard, then? We’re at war! Twelve o’clock last night we declared war on Germany!”
Chapter Seven
War fever gripped Hillsbridge as it gripped the rest of England.
The Mothers Union, under the guidance of Caroline Archer, started a sewing circle to make warm clothing for ‘our brave soldiers,’ and not to be outdone, Martha Durrant and the stalwarts of the chapel organized knitting bees.
As for the men, they were wildly jubilant, treating the war as a glorified glove fight or football match, and cheering from the sidelines.
“Kaiser Bill’s in for a shock if you ask me,” Moses Brimble remarked to a group of regulars in the Miners Arms one evening towards the end of August. “If he thinks he’s going to eat his next Christmas dinner in Buckingham Palace, he’s got another thing coming!”
“We’ll soon show him what’s what,” Hubert Freke, long past being able to show anyone anything, predicted confidently.
“Well, now Kitchener’s in charge of the War Office, we will.” James Hall put in.
There were murmurs of agreement from the other men sitting in a loose circle around the tables. Lord Kitchener was a popular figure, whose name still held magic, and already Colwyn Yelling, Evan Comer and Jacob Cottle’s son, Bert, had responded to his first appeal for 100,000 men. In spite of fierce opposition from their parents, they had been among the first to join the queues at the recruiting office, and were now drilling on Salisbury Plain.
“It’ll all be over by Christmas, anyway,” Hubert Freke went on. “The boys won’t see nothing of no fighting, if you ask me. The Navy will take care of it all—see if I’m not right.”
There were a few mutterings of dissent from the other men. As an old naval man who had seen service in the Boer Wars and actually sailed on the Bacchante with the King when he was still Prince George, Hubert was known to favour the Navy as the answer to everything. But to most of them, the big ships were slow, unwieldy instruments of war compared to the guns of the modern army. If it came to a real dogfight, with Kaiser Bill trying to get into Britain by the back door, maybe it would be useful to have a few gunboats in the channel to send him off with a flea in his ear. But for fighting and winning, the English Tommy would take some beating.
“You know they’re having Stanley Bristow’s horses?” Jim Hall said. Since the baby had been born, he had become a regular in the Miners Arms along with his father, for although Alex was a good baby most of the day, he seemed too fond of crying in the evening, for Jim’s liking.
“Stanley Bristow’s horses!” Moses exclaimed.
“I bet he’s in a way about that. He looks after those horses like his children. Still, like I say, ’twon’t be for long,” persisted Hubert Freke.
“Let’s hope not, anyway,” Reuben Tapper, porter on the Somerset and Dorset railway, remarked. “ The government are supposed to have taken us over, but they don’t know what the’m doing, and that’s a fact. If we don’t soon get back to normal, there won’t be a railway left—not one that’s worth having, anyway.”
The men continued to drink their beer, pushing all harbingers of doom and destruction to the back of their minds. They did not want to think about the uncomfortable change in the pattern of their lives. They discounted it, as they had discounted the threat of a food shortage. They had no way of knowing that the German Army was swarming up over the flat Belgian countryside, sweeping everything before it.
So they drank and laughed, not realizing that the bitter straggle ahead would affect each and every one of them, and mean the end of a whole way of life.
THEIR jubilation did not last long. It was shattered with the news of the first Hillsbridge casualty—Jacob Cottle’s son, Bert.
Charlotte was in the County Stores when she heard of it. It was her afternoon for serving behind the counter, and she was weighing up dried fruit for Martha Durrant and trying to avoid being talked into knitting socks for the soldiers.
“I’ve got enough work of my own to do, Martha,” she was saying, when Amy came bursting in, breathless with the news.
“Mammy, what do you think? Mrs Cottle’s had a telegram—Bert’s been killed!”
Charlotte went cold. She stood, paper bag in one hand, scoop of sultanas in the other, and felt for a moment as if the ground had rocked beneath her.
Bert Cottle—young Bert? Killed? It couldn’t be true!
On the other side of the counter, Martha Durrant had gone white, and Charlotte knew she was experiencing the same feeling of disbelief.
“Why? How?” she asked foolishly.
“Oh, Mammy, I don’t know,” Amy’s voice was impatient “It was only a telegram.”
“Then how d’you know it’s right?” Charlotte asked.
“Because Mr Cottle said. I heard him tell Mr Brimble. And he looked really strange. I think he’d been crying.”
“Dear Lord,” Charlotte said “ Bert Cottle. Well, well, our Jim’s going to be upset about that.”
They stood in silence for a moment, still stunned by the news. Then, with a quick, determined movement, Charlotte folded down the top of the sultana bag.
“How many pairs of socks did you want me to knit, Martha?” she asked, matter-of-factly.
They continued discussing the knitting circle then, and when Charlotte had finished serving Martha, she suggested to Amy that she might as well take Harry home with her. But when they had gone, she lost concentration. It was incredible. Bert Cottle dead! She could remember the last time she had seen him, swinging along the rank and whistling ‘Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland.’ Well, he was in dreamland now, poor lad.
Everyone in the town was shocked by Bert Cottle’s death, even those who did not know him. The Hillsbridge Mercury carried a full report, under a banner headline: LOCAL MAN DIES AT YPRES. And there was a photograph of Bert, smiling proudly under his military cap.
The town read the report with growing dismay. Bert’s unit, the North Somerset Yeomanry, had been sent to Ypres, or ‘Wipers’ as they called it, and after two days and two nights in the trenches, Bert had been killed by a coal-box shell. Five other men had been hit by the same coal-box.
The horror of it was almost beyond belief, but there was more to come. Within a matter of days, news was received that Colwyn Yelling had been wounded, with shrapnel in his shoulder and a badly damaged arm, and was being shipped back to hospital in Portsmouth.
As soon as Peggy heard he had arrived, she arranged to go down to see him, and when she returned to Hillsbridge, with his terrible stories of the fighting in France fresh in her mind, she was almost beside herself with worry.
“He saw Bert Cottle killed,” she told Charlotte, sitting white-faced in the Halls’ kitchen. “He says it’s sheer hell out there. The Germans have got some sort of guns—Jack Johnsons he called them—that’ll make a hole twenty feet deep and thirty feet across. You can’t imagine it, can you? That’s bigger than your kitchen and mine put together! And the towns, he says, are smashed to matchboxes. People are having to leave while their homes burn and take to the roads with all they can carry in carts and wheelbarrows. He says it’s like being in heaven just to be in hospital.”
“I don’t know what to say, Peg.” Charlotte was worried to see the usually strong and capable Peggy so upset “You stay there, and I’ll put the kettle on for a cup of tea.”
But even then, horrified though she was, the war did not seem real to her. For life in England was much the same as it had ever been.
Autumn had turned to winter beneath rain-heavy grey skies, the leaves had fallen from the trees to lie in sodden heaps in the gutters. In spite of the knitting bees and the newspaper reports of fighting and the fund that Jack’s school at Wells had set up to send plum puddings for Christmas to the boys at the Front, she found it hard to imagine that beneath the same grey skies a land across the Channel was ravaged an
d desolate, tramped over, burnt and blown-up, and she did not have the time or energy to try.
So when the stories began to circulate about the German spies infiltrating the country, she dismissed them as fanciful and foolish. And when James came home one evening and told her the latest suspect was Algie Smith, the manager at the County Stores, she almost laughed in his face.
“What are you on about?” she demanded, looking up incredulously from the boiled bacon she was slicing. “Mr Smith, a German spy? He comes from London.”
“So he says,” James said cryptically. “ But the story as I’ve heard it is that his name isn’t Smith at all. It’s Schmitt. And his wife’s foreign. You can’t deny that”
“She’s Dutch,” Charlotte said. “ She comes from Holland.”
“She’s not likely to admit being a German, if she’s here to spy,” James argued.
“But they were here before the war started!”
James wagged his head knowingly. “Planted here, in good time, so that when it all started, nobody’d think it were funny, them coming.”
“Well, I think it’s the silliest thing I ever heard,” Charlotte said, resuming her slicing of the bacon. “ Mr Smith’s no more a German than you or I.”
“I don’t know so much,” James reiterated stubbornly. “And I think you ought to stop going down there to work, Lotty.”
She set the knife down with a clatter. “ Whatever for?”
“Because whether it’s right or not, it’s what people are saying. You’ll get a bad name for yourself. They’ll call you a German lover.”
“That’s nonsense!” Charlotte said.
But James went on: “ I want you to give notice. If you write it out, one of the boys can take it down to him.”
“Now?” Charlotte exclaimed. “ You mean today?”
“There’s no time like the present,” James said. “I don’t want you associating with Germans, Lotty. Nothing’s too bad for them. One of the blokes at work was only saying today, his wife’s nephew has been hit in the face and lost the sight of both his eyes. And he’s just twenty-one. It’s terrible, what they’m doing.”
She nodded “I won’t argue with that. But it’s got nothing to do with Mr Smith. It’s a good job I’ve got there, and good money. And goodness knows, we can do with it, with all our Jack needs.”
She saw James’s face tighten and knew that she had said the wrong thing. Only last week, Jack had come home needing a new cap, because the other boys had taken his while fooling about on the railway station, and somehow it had been lost. James had been furious, saying boys like them should know better.
“I don’t care, Lotty,” he said firmly. “ There’s not much I put my foot down over, but this is one time when I’m going to. Now, write out that notice, or I shall.”
She could see his mind was made up, and she knew it was no good to argue any more. Much as she loved the job, it would have to go, or there’d be more trouble than it was worth. And besides, if this rumour gathered strength, there wouldn’t be a job for her to go to much longer. People wouldn’t shop at the County Stores if they thought Mr Smith was a German. In fact, there didn’t seem to have been as many customers as usual this afternoon.
“All right,” she said. “ But I’m finishing the week out, James. There’s a floor down there that wants washing, and I’m not leaving Mr Smith in the lurch.”
James, knowing this was the best he could hope for, remained silent, but there was a strained atmosphere around the table as they ate their evening meal, which the boys didn’t help by harking back to the subject of Mrs Smith again.
“I reckon she’s got a wireless set in that box thing she sits in,” Ted speculated.
“She could hide earphones in those coils round her ears,” Fred added.
“And what do you think she’d hear in Hillsbridge worth passing on?” Charlotte asked crossly.
What was this war doing to people? she wondered later as she set out down the hill, her notice in an envelope in her pocket. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Bert Cottle had been killed, Colwyn Yelling wounded, and the unknown boy blinded, now people were beginning to turn against one another, making mischief where there should be none.
It was a dark night, but fine, and a light in the room above the shop told Charlotte that the Smiths were at home. She did not need to disturb them, however. She let herself in through the backdoor with her own key, took off her coat in the small stock room, and set about filling a pail with water.
As yet she had not decided the best way of giving her notice to Mr Smith, and she thought about it again as she carried the steaming pail into the shop and went back for her broom and scrubbing brush. Under normal circumstances, she would have come out with it straight, but these were not normal circumstances.
“Drat the war!” she said loudly. Why had it had to come along and make complications just when everything had been sailing along so nicely?
When she had swept the floor, she took her pail of water and scrubbing brush and went down on her hands and knees behind the counter.
She began to scrub vigorously, venting her anger on the floor. So engrossed, was she, she did not notice the voices outside, or if she did, she thought nothing of them. And when the first explosive crash came, it made her jump so much that her heart seemed to stop beating.
Automatically she leaped up, but the edge of the counter caught her shoulder, knocking her down again and half-stunning her with shock and pain. She felt water slopping from the bucket around her knees, and still she didn’t know what was happening until there was another crash and another, and an awful, nerve-jarring rumble like thunder right beside her. As it died away, she realized it was glass breaking and tins tumbling down.
She struggled to her feet again, and the sound of voices came at her through the broken window—not one voice, or two, but a cacophony of noise rising like an angry tide. As she stood, frozen, gripping the counter with shaking hands, there was another crash and the glass door shattered. At once, the black baize blind billowed out alarmingly. A stone, flying into the shop through the broken down. Then the lamp went out.
Shaking like a leaf, Charlotte edged along the counter. In the glow of the street-lamp she could see a dozen or more men, brandishing sticks, stones and bottles. She drew back, but too late. They had seen her.
“There he is, the German bugger!” someone yelled. “ Let’s get him, boys!”
Another stone came hurtling through the window, showering her with fragments of glass, and as she backed away into the dark interior she realized what was happening. The story of Algie Smith being a spy must have spread, and these men had come after him!
Panic flooded through her then, making her go first hot, then cold. They were like madmen—madmen! But she could still get out through the back door if she was quick.
She turned wildly, but her elbow caught the scale and pile of weights, knocking them over, so that they crashed to the floor. She stopped again, a sob catching in her throat. But at that same moment another kind of dread swamped her.
Algie Smith and his wife were upstairs, trapped, and these men were in murderous mood. If someone didn’t stop them, heaven only knew what they would do.
Undecided, she stood her ground, as other men followed the first through the window. Tins of treacle, bottles of gripewater and a display of Lux wafers went everywhere, as the men barged their way in.
Then one of the men saw her standing there and stopped in his tracks.
“Mrs Hall, what are you doing here?”
The men behind him were too drunk, or too enraged, to care.
“Come on, out of the bloody way! We want the German bastard. We’re going to make him bloody suffer!”
Charlotte took a step backwards and almost tripped over the broom she had left propped against the counter. Automatically she caught at it, holding it out in front of her threateningly.
“You keep away from me!” she cried.
To her surprise, the men stopped,
looking at her uncertainly, but at that moment she caught sight of a youth climbing on to the counter and reaching up to swing on the overhead cash railway. Without even stopping to think, she rushed across to him.
“Get down from there!” she shouted, outrage lending her courage. “Get down before I knock you down!”
He backed away from her threshing broom, and, still holding on to the wire railway and its pulley, he fell backwards to the floor. As he fell, there was a sickening sound of tearing plaster and splintering wood, and slowly the cash railway separated itself from the ceiling. One by one its wires fell, draping themselves around the men in the shop and dangling drunkenly from the corners of the wooden cage that was Mrs Smith’s lofty office.
Charlotte watched in horror and disbelief. Her beloved cash railway was ruined! Ruined! Never again would the wooden cups hum along the wire. Never again would it return exactly the right amount of change for her to hand to a waiting customer.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, the lot of you!” she cried. “ Grown men, are you? Well, if you want to fight Germans, go and join the army. Or does it take twenty of you to get one man and his wife? Get out! Get out before the bobbies get here and arrest the lot of you!”
And to her amazement, they went. Ashamed, suddenly, they turned and shuffled away, some through the window, stuffing their pockets with tins and bottles as they went, some through the shattered glass door. Sergeant Eyles, who had rushed to the scene with as many burly constables as he could muster as soon as he heard the disturbance, arrived at just the right moment. He was able to round them up, and take them back to the police station.
When he heard the police outside, Algie Smith, who had been hiding with his wife in the stoutest wardrobe they owned, braved it down the stairs, and found Charlotte sitting on an overturned box in the wrecked shop. She was shaking from head to foot, perspiration dripping down her face and into the hands that were pressed tight against her mouth. Beside her lay the broom, its head nesting against her soaking feet.
