The Black Mountains

by Janet Tanner

  NOT LONG afterwards, Jack learned that he had been awarded the DSC—“the price of a leg,” Charlotte called it—but in spite of her threats to dump it in the rubbish bin, he knew she was as proud as he when he went to Buckingham Palace for his investiture by the King.

  “What did he say to you?” she asked, over and over again, never tiring of Jack’s anecdotes, and he knew that if he told her the truth about what he really thought—that the King must be sick to death of the endless procession of servicemen presented to him to be honoured—it would only spoil it for her.

  “A son of mine at Buckingham Palace, and shaking hands with the King,” she would mutter to herself. It was a supreme accolade, which she took personally and of which she never tired of thinking about. All Hillsbridge now treated Jack like a hero. The Mercury glowed with praise for him, and his brothers too—”this patriotic family,” it called them, and there were photographs of Ted and Fred taken from earlier issues and even a rehash of Fred’s exploit when he had cycled with the telegraph message under heavy fire.

  “If it weren’t for the Halls there wouldn’t be no paper this week!” Charlie Durrant grumbled, but he was pleased too, because he had the distinction of living next door to someone who had won the Distinguished Service Cross.

  But as the cheering died away, the atmosphere in the town was a sombre one. Battered and bruised by the happenings of the last four years, they had almost given up hope of it ever ending.

  “It’s the modern-day Armageddon,” Caroline Archer said to her friends in the sewing and knitting circles, and for once, no one felt like disagreeing with her.

  IT ENDED on a pale November day when the sun shining through the bare trees turned the wet streets to liquid silver. Its death warrant was signed in a railway carriage that had once rattled through Europe with the noblest of passengers. By communiqué and order, notice of its impending demise was passed from front to front across the countryside it had shattered and beaten to a bare and bloodied wasteland.

  In England the news broke with surprising suddenness, bursting on tired ears like a bright mountain spring, then gathering force as it rushed and tumbled onward to become a great, joyful torrent, sweeping away doubt and despair like dead leaves caught in its foaming tide.

  The war was over. The killing had stopped. At eleven o’clock the maroons had been fired. And the boys would be coming home.

  As the whisper became a shout, people rushed into the streets, delirious with joy, waving flags, hugging one another, and dancing. Fire crackers exploded on the railway lines, bells pealed in church towers the length and breadth of the land, and in London crowds flocked to the palace in the hope of catching a glimpse of the King. They packed into motor buses and taxis and even military lorries; going nowhere in particular, they were too relieved and excited to care where they ended up.

  The war was over. No more bombing raids. No more rationing. No more black-edged telegrams. The war was over, and the Kaiser had fled like the coward they had always known him to be. And the shout of triumph that went up was so infectious that even the children, too young to understand, joined in.

  For too many, of course, the victory had come too late. In Hillsbridge alone, there were fifty-three men and boys who would never come home again. And there were plenty more, like Jack, and Colwyn Yelling, and Evan Comer, who would carry the scars with them to their graves.

  The war was over, let it die. But never, ever, let humanity forget what suffering and slaughter it had caused, or what courage and comradeship it had revealed.

  The war to end all wars, they had called it. With God’s grace, it would be just that.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  On the heels of the Great War came the influenza epidemic, and people went down like flies. Whole families, their resistance weakened by years of rationing, succumbed, and the Halls were no exception.

  On the first Saturday in December, James, Jack and Harry were all confined to their beds. At lunchtime, Charlotte, bringing them mugs of weak tea, was taken ill almost without warning. The vague stirrings of nausea she had been trying to ignore all day suddenly overcame her, and she collapsed in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs. Roused from their sick beds by the noise, the others groped their way downstairs to find her lying in a pool of spilled tea and broken china.

  They got her to bed, although she protested weakly, and one of the Clements boys was given a threepenny bit to run up to Captain Fish’s and bring either Dolly or Amy home. Dolly was indispensable, so Amy came, not very pleased at the role of sick nurse.

  “Hasn’t anyone wondered if I might get the influenza, walking right into it like this?” she inquired plaintively as she filled her father’s stone water bottle with hot water and placed it against his back.

  “You won’t get it, Amy,” Charlotte said with certainty. “Apart from your accident, I don’t believe you’ve had a day’s illness in your life.”

  “That’s because I’m like you, Mam,” Amy replied, and as she hurried out of the room, Charlotte stared after her, smiling to herself. Amy like her? Yes, perhaps she was. Except that I’m getting old, thought Charlotte, and the realization chilled her in much the same way as the realization had chilled Jack that his leg had gone forever. Old age was something that happened to other people. Bones might ache, she might get tired more easily, and the face that looked back at her from the kitchen mirror might have more lines. But inside she felt like the woman she had always been.

  “I’m only forty-four, and I could still have another child if I was daft enough,” she told herself. But when every move was such an effort it left her dizzy, limp and shaking, Charlotte found herself more conscious of her mortality than she had been at any time since she had been expecting Harry. Her own mother, she remembered, had died when she was only thirty-two years old, and the aunt who had brought her up, and who had seemed such a very old woman to her at the time, could not have been much older than she was now.

  As for James …

  Charlotte cast a sidelong look at him, wheezing in the big double bed beside her. There was an unhealthy pallor to his skin that she did not like, and it heightened her awareness of her own age. They had been young together. Now, he was a sick and broken old man who would struggle through a few more years’ work at most before succumbing to the inevitable and wheezing out his last years in his favourite chair with the open fire for a spittoon.

  But what we did together, James! she thought. What we did together! We made a home and raised a family, and none of them has done anything to disgrace themselves or us. That at least is something to be able to stand tall and say. Each one of them has done us proud, in his own way. And if I can’t help feeling that Jack is mine and mine alone, you were still a father to him, James. Nothing can take that away from you, not even me and my silly notions.

  She lay back against the pillows once more, drifting in the hinterland that is midway between sleeping and waking, and when the first sounds of the commotion downstairs edged into her consciousness, she thought it was part of her dream. She moved her head restlessly on the pillow, blowing the stale taste of sleep out of her mouth and wishing she could move without aching in every bone. But the noise persisted: Nipper barking, raised voices, Amy’s high and hysterical tones, and another voice that if she hadn’t been dreaming she would have thought …

  “Mam, Mam, are you awake?” It was Amy in the doorway. “Mam, Dad, there’s someone to see you!”

  She sat up then, aches and pains forgotten. But she still thought for a moment that the figure framed in the doorway was part of a delirious imagining. Her bunched fist found her mouth and slowly opened like the petals of a sea anemone to mask her face. And only then did she speak.

  “Ted!” she said, her voice muffled by her fingers. “Ted, what are you doing here?”

  He came into the bedroom smiling. “What a way to greet me after all this time! Not much of a home-coming, is it?”

  His voice was exactly as she remembered it and had heard
it a million times in her mind while he had been away, but oh, the look of him … The cheekbones seemed about to protrude through the fair skin, and the eyes, blue as ever, had a haunted look about them that had not been there before. But as she stared at him above the tips of her splayed fingers, her heart seemed to burst in her throat, and weak tears rose in her eyes.

  “Hey, Mam, that won’t do!” he chided, laughing but embarrassed. “And, Dad, too—is he asleep or what?”

  Charlotte swallowed her tears and reached over to shake James awake.

  “Wake up, Dad! Our Ted’s here! Look, it’s our Ted home! Would you believe it!”

  James, bleary and congested, rolled over to face the door, and then with an effort pulled himself up in bed as Charlotte had done.

  “Our Ted?” he echoed incredulously.

  Suddenly the small room was full of people. Amy, who had followed Ted upstairs, her face wreathed in smiles, Jack, who had hopped in from his room, Nipper going quite crazy despite the fact he was white around the whiskers these days and a bit stiff in his back legs, and even young Harry, still poorly but anxious not to miss a single moment of the excitement.

  Ted reached out to ruffle his hair, and Charlotte noticed with a painful start that even his hands were thinner, the nails grown too long and the veins standing out in blue ridges.

  “Oh, my boy, just look at you!” she said, her voice thick with emotion.

  Ted pulled his cap off and tossed it on to the bed in a gesture that was almost defiant.

  “Well, at least I’m alive, Mam,” he said.

  The statement sobered each one of them with the exception of little Harry, for it reminded them all too sharply that Fred would never be coming back. But almost as one they closed their minds to the sad thought Fred might be gone, but Ted was here, and they were not going to let anything mar the moment of his home-coming.

  “Well Ted, you’ve really hit us for six!” James said, his voice wheezy, and Charlotte told Amy to run downstairs and put the kettle on.

  “This is a fine state of affairs,” she said, wiping her eyes on one of James’s large handkerchiefs. “If we’d known you were coming, we could have had something ready for you, instead of this. Why ever didn’t you send a telegram or something?”

  “I thought that would only frighten you,” Ted said reasonably. “You never did like to see the telegram boy coming this way. And besides, I hardly had time. One minute I was a prisoner of war in a Fritzy camp, and the next I was on the boat home. I still can’t believe it myself.”

  “Freeing prisoners is just about the first priority now an Armistice has been signed,” Jack put in. “You’re home a lot sooner than you would have been if you hadn’t been taken, Ted, because they still need a lot of soldiers to act as policemen out there, and they will do for quite a long time yet, I should think.”

  Ted nodded soberly. “ It’s still a hell of a mess, if you ask me. But I’m not going to worry myself about that now. I’m home. That’s good enough for me. And how about the rest of you? What’s up with you all?”

  His words were a signal for general hubbub. The first stilted, surprised moments were over, and suddenly everyone was talking at once, half-laughing, half-crying, all contributing snippets of news that no one could properly take in. When Amy came back with the tea, she too joined in.

  “Well, this is the best tonic we could have had,” Charlotte said at last, setting down her cup and looking around at her assembled family. “ We’ve all been pretty rough, but this is going to do us the world of good. Why, it’s just like it used to be at Christmas when you were all little.”

  And so it was. Jack was sitting in the window-sill, Ted and Amy had perched themselves on the edge of the bed, and Harry had clambered in between the sheets with Charlotte and James.

  The mention of Christmas reminded them of food. None of them had been able to eat a thing for almost a week, and even the thought of it had made them feel sick. But after three years of living in a prison camp, Ted did not give that a thought.

  “Oh, do you remember the spread we used to have!” he said. “A nice fat cockerel from the fowlman, and a ham you could slice at for days.”

  “And parsnips and potatoes cooked in the oven,” Jack put in. “And Mam’s mince pies.”

  “And Christmas pudding and custard,” Amy added, and suddenly, miraculously, they were all ravenously hungry.

  “Things aren’t what they were,” Charlotte explained. “We’ve had food rationing here, too. There’s been a shortage of some things. But we’ve still been able to grow our own vegetables, and there’s usually a bit of a porker to be had if you keep your ears open.”

  “I’ve got a piece of bacon in the larder now,” Amy told them. “It’s salted, and I thought it would keep all right until you were all fit to eat it.”

  Charlotte nodded. “Well, make sure, Amy. We don’t want to be bad again. And talking of salted, there’s a stone jar in the pantry full of kidney beans I put down last August. Do some of them to go with it. Do you think you can manage, or shall I get up and come down to help you?”

  “No, I can manage, Mam. You stay where you are,” Amy said, and when Charlotte had finished giving her instructions, she clattered off down the stairs to make a start on preparing the meal. Jack, that much further along the road to recovery than the others, went with her to help peel potatoes.

  “Well, Ted, this is a treat,” Charlotte said when the room was comparatively empty again, but Ted’s face had grown serious.

  “Mam, I was waiting for them to go before I ask you—have you seen anything of Becky?”

  The blood seemed to leave Charlotte’s body in a rush, and she felt weak and sick again. From the moment Ted had appeared in the doorway, she had known it had to come, but she had tried not to think about it, just as she had tried not to think about Fred, dead and buried in France. Ted knew about Fred, of course. She had broken the news to him in one of the scores of letters she had written while he was a prisoner of war. But she had never mentioned what had happened to Rebecca, thinking that, if he knew, he might lose the will to live, and clinging, without much hope, to the straw that by the time he returned, he might have forgotten her a little.

  Now, however, seeing the anxiety and eagerness in his face, that last faint hope died. Ted still loved the girl, maybe even more than he had done when he marched away, if that were possible. And now she had to tell him Rebecca was dead. There was no escaping it any longer.

  As if he had read from her expression that something was amiss, his face changed. “ Why haven’t you ever mentioned her in your letters, Mam? I’ve asked about her often enough.”

  Beside her, Charlotte felt Harry wriggle as if he had sensed the tension, but James lay back on the pillows, his eyes fixed on a point far outside the bedroom window, and she knew she could expect no help from him.

  “Harry, I think it’s time you went back to your own bed,” she said, and then, as he began to protest, “ No, do as you’re told, there’s a good boy. You can come back again when supper’s ready if you’re still feeling better.”

  A subdued Harry obeyed. As he passed Ted he looked up at him as if expecting him to ruffle his hair again, but Ted was preoccupied now.

  When the door had closed after him, Ted came closer to the bed. “There’s something wrong, isn’t there, Mam? That’s why you didn’t mention her. And why she hasn’t written, either.” His voice was as even as ever, but Charlotte heard the suppressed fear that was in him, and her heart went out to him.

  “Ted …” she said helplessly.

  “Come on, Mam, out with it. Her father’s taken her away somewhere, is that it?”

  “No. Oh, Ted, it’s your first day home …”

  “Mam!” he said warningly.

  “It’s bad news, Ted.” Unexpectedly, James spoke, swivelling his rheumy blue eyes to meet his son’s. “Your mother’s kept it from you because it wasn’t something she could write in a letter. Not as things were.”

 
“What do you mean, Dad?”

  As Ted turned his questions to his father, Charlotte felt a glow of gratitude.

  “I mean you’ve got to brace yourself for a shock, son,” James said quietly. “Now you know what I’m going to tell you, don’t you? You’ve seen enough of death these last years to learn you a thing or two, and …”

  “Death?” Ted had turned chalk white. “ Death? You can’t mean that Becky …”

  James nodded slowly, stifling a wheeze that rose in his throat, and Ted stood stunned and unbelieving like a boxer who has taken a knock-out blow, yet somehow, incredibly, is still on his feet.

  “Becky—dead?” he repeated. “But how—why? I don’t understand.”

  “She was taken ill, Ted,” Charlotte said gently. “It was all very sudden. We never did hear the rights of it, except that it happened in the middle of the night. By the time they got the doctor to her, she was gone.”

  “But when did this happen?” Ted asked, and Charlotte and James exchanged glances.

  “Oh, a long time ago, Ted. It must have been—yes, it was just after you were posted as missing …” Charlotte broke off, uncertain as to how to go on. She had told him before in her letters about Rebecca’s photograph that had been in the News of the World, and how they had thought it was proof that he was dead, and he had replied, telling them how his wallet had been stolen or mislaid that first day on the Somme, and the mutilated body on which it had been found must have belonged to whoever had pocketed it. But she had said nothing about Rebecca’s visit, and she was unwilling to mention it now. Bad enough that she should be dead, without him thinking, as she did, that perhaps she had killed herself because she could not bear to live without him.

  “Dear God!” His hands closed over one of the brass knobs of the bedposts squeezing them until his knuckles turned white.

  “She was at home when it happened,” Charlotte told him. “They’d sold the house at Eastlands and moved out to High Compton, and her father had fetched her home.”