by Peter Rimmer
The day the shares were listed in London should have been the best day of their lives in Johannesburg. They were two hours ahead of London. When the closing price was telegraphed they were all still in the office, all with mixed feelings. People were talking about a world war not just a war. South Africa was going to be drawn into the fray. Only the salaried young men from the mine and explosives company, who had been invited to head office to celebrate the flotation, were excited. The older men who had been through the Anglo-Boer War were quiet. At the end of the trading day their shares were trading at a thirty per cent premium. Everybody clapped at the news.
"Now all we have to do is make sure Serendipity makes a profit," said Sallie bringing them down to earth.
"But it's a start. A good start. We now have the capital. The rest is up to the lot of us in this room and the men at the mine and the factory. Every hourly paid employee will receive a bonus of five pounds whatever the colour of their skin. The rest of you will have to wait for year-end profit when five per cent will be set aside for salaried staff in proportion to your pay. Now just get me the job done… Someone had better start opening the champagne. Mr Pringle will pop the first cork."
The day Jared Wentworth arrived at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, to start his naval training, Serendipity shares broke through the two-pound level. No one told him. He was too busy collecting his kit. The petty officer in charge of recruits was foul-mouthed and abusive. The way he said 'welcome to the Royal Navy' was a cross between a threat and a sneer. Jared's basic training had begun, and though he did not know it at the time, like a lot of other people in England and around the world, his life had changed forever. The pampered life of an English gentleman was to be lost in the horror of war.
In London, Jack was sick to his stomach. It was as if the nation had smelled blood. Patriotism. Honour. Duty. Words on everyone's lips. Union Jacks everywhere as if waving the flag would frighten the Germans… What frightened Jack most was everyone seemed to want the war. Eyes gleamed with fervour. Blood rushed to the head. Young men mobbed the recruitment centres. There was no shortage of volunteers. Young men bubbling with excitement of war giving each other false courage. 'We are all together now' as if before the war they had nothing to do with each other. No doubt, Jack thought, in Germany they were waving German flags with equal excitement. Neither side mentioned the stomach flutters to each other. The apprehension. The fear. Jack thought that will come later, with realism.
With sober mind and an inkling of what was to come, Jack took himself off to his nearest recruitment centre. The war was a month old. In a business suit and a top hat, he looked incongruous next to men wearing rough clothes and cloth hats. Two of them slapped Jack, a tall thin man with broad shoulders, on his back in the excitement. His hair was prematurely grey under the silk hat. He smiled at the man, for no reason appalled at being touched by a stranger. 'There'll be more of that' he said to himself ruefully. The papers talked of Germany invading France and Belgium. One had said that morning that British troops of the Highland regiment had made contact with the Germans. No one was really sure. The truth had already been lost to the censors. What had once been news he could trust was now propaganda. Between the lines, and cross-referencing more than one of the London newspapers, Jack thought some of the regular army had crossed the channel. The Highland regiment was famous and the paper had reeled off its glorious history.
When he reached the end of the line he faced a low table. Two bareheaded soldiers with their hats on the table were seated behind it on wooden chairs. One was a corporal, one was a sergeant. That much Jack knew about the ranks of the army. At St Paul's he had been in the Combined Cadet Force, the CCF. He had twice fired a rifle. In badly fitting uniforms they had marched up and down a road at the back of the quadrangle. Then the sergeant who drilled them had been called back into the real army and gone off to South Africa. The school never saw him again. A year after leaving St Paul's, Jack learned Sergeant Small had been killed at the Battle of Colenso. Jack was pleased he had died a soldier's death. Some years later in his club, an old boy who had been a senior when Jack was in his first term, told him Small had died of fever in Bloemfontein without hearing a shot fired in anger. Jack remembered he had disliked the senior when he was at school.
The corporal was having trouble writing with an indelible pencil, licking the blue end of the stump to make it write better. He was filling in forms in triplicate, the carbon paper cramping out of line between the forms, each set pinned together. There was a pile of pinned forms in front of each soldier. He took a fresh set without looking up and poised the stump of the pencil.
"Name!"
"Jack Merryweather. Or rather, John Claud Percival Merryweather."
"Blimey! Where you from!"
"27 Baker Street. About a mile from here."
"Age?"
"Twenty-five."
The corporal looked up at the immaculately dressed Jack standing in front of him.
"Shit, Sarge. 'Ave a look at this… What you doin' 'ere?"
"Offering my services to the King."
They both looked at him, the sergeant and the corporal, and giggled.
"How old you say?" said the sergeant.
"Twenty-five."
"Not in this century. Take off your 'at."
Jack obliged and stood bareheaded while everyone had a look at him.
"Look, sir. We like the idea, don't we lads?" the sergeant said to the young men in the queue behind him. "You won't see forty again. This is a war. Crawling around on our bellies, see. Put your 'at back on and go 'ome."
"I'm thirty-three."
"And I'm the Pope. Go 'ome. Next!"
As Jack turned round and walked away he had never felt a bigger fool in his life. A taxi driver answered the call of his raised rolled umbrella.
"Three cheers for the toff," someone called.
Jack gave the driver the address of his club. There were raising their cloth hats on the third cheer when the cab drove away. It was all done with good humour but it made Jack feel miserable. The only time he had looked for a job in his life he had been told to go home.
The club was empty. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. Jack did something he had never done before in his life and sat at the bar alone.
"You all right, sir?"
When in company, he had always jollied along with the barman. He rather thought they liked each other… He felt like he had felt as a junior at St Paul's. Insignificant. Totally insignificant.
"Give me a large pink gin."
The barman looked hurt.
"I'm sorry, Jim. I'm not all right. Just been tossed out of the King's army before I got a foot in the door. Said I was too old."
"You've got to lie."
"Said I was twenty-five. Stood there like a twerp with my hat off. Whole bloody lot laughed at me. Called for three cheers for the toff."
"They meant it nicely."
"That made it worse."
Jack took his club card, signed for his drink, and looked up. Jim was openly laughing.
"Don't you start."
"Quite frankly, sir, I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. Why do men rush off so quickly to get themselves killed? Why does everyone suddenly in the world want to rip each other's throats?… Why on earth did you volunteer in the first place?"
"It's weird. I can't quite answer that. I was drawn to it. As if going would be important. Didn't want to be left out. I don't think it was anything to do with wanting a fight. Or being called a coward. I didn't want to be left out of the herd for the first time in my life. All that I have I owed to other people. This was my turn to do something for what I have. Maybe I just felt needed until they told me to piss off. And if anyone asks, Jim, I'll always deny I ever spoke those words in the club. Have a drink with me. There are going to be a lot of rules broken in this war. If a member comes, shove it under the bar. And give me another one of those pink gins. I'm glad you laughed. Better
to laugh than cry."
When he left the club he was a little drunk. It had had nothing to do with the club rules. Or the war. He needed someone to drink with. He was lonely.
The taxi, when it came, had to stop quickly as Jack lurched off the pavement into the road. It was seven o'clock in the evening. After three stiff pink gins with Jim the barman, the usual five o'clock old soaks had come into the club. By then Jack was drunk enough to greet them as old friends. In the middle stages of getting drunk, everyone was his friend.
When Fay opened the door it was the first time she had seen him drunk.
"The army wouldn't have me, Fay," he said like a small boy.
"You poor darling. Come in. Your Fay will have you. Your Fay will always have you. I'll make you some supper. We don't have to go out. I'll make us a nice fluffy omelette."
When she came back from the kitchen with the cooked omelettes he was sound asleep in the armchair. She thought of waking him and then sat down and ate both omelettes. When she went to bed much later she left him in the chair. He was too heavy to lift.
When she woke in the morning he was gone.
At lunchtime there was a knock on the door and she flew to open it. Outside was an old man with an armful of flowers. He said he was from the local florist. And no, there was no note.
'Men,' she said to herself, 'have a strange way of apologising.' She gave the old man half a crown for his troubles which was far too much. But an apology was an apology. The flowers flowed into three vases. When she finished her arrangements she was perfectly content. There were advantages in having an old man as a lover, she told herself. They may not make love so often but they were too old to go to war. She didn't have to worry about her Jack getting himself blown to pieces.
Not being a man to take no for an answer, Jack had got on the phone. One of his friends from school had joined the regular army and had been sent to South Africa. He had led a small unit of colonials around the bush chasing Boers for nearly two years. Wounded twice, the army had given him a Queen's South Africa Medal. At the end of the Anglo-Boer War, Jeremy Flagstaff came back to England a hero. When war broke out with Germany, the medal on his tunic stood out. When Jack's phone call caught up with him at Aldershot, he was the youngest captain in the British Army which at thirty-four didn't say much for the peacetime army. Jack told him of his rejection, but not the three cheers for the toff.
"And I don't want a staff job. Or be a clerk in a uniform. How do I get a military training, Jeremy? I want to fight this war and not be a spectator. For once I have something important to me."
"Go back to St Paul's and apply through the CCF. They'll send you to an officer cadet training unit. I can probably wangle you a posting to Aldershot. We're the largest OCTU in the country. St Paul's will lie for you about your age. Get yourself fit, Jack. Don't walk around the park, run. Do physical exercises."
"I'm prematurely grey."
"Then dye your bloody hair. Good luck. You'll make a good officer Jack. That much I do know. You'll feel like mincemeat at the end of the officer training course, but you'll also feel ten years younger. I probably won't be here. I'm going to France next week. I can't wait to see some action again. Peacetime soldiering is a bore."
The huts were roofed with tin and had been built during the Crimean War. The heat in summer was intolerable. The parade ground at Aldershot was hard, dusty and large. The days the longest Jack had ever known. The pain more than his worst imagination. He could have run around every park in London every day, done 'physical jokes' till his head spun. He could have been eighteen years old. Nothing, nothing, he told his tortured mind and body, could have prepared him for the three-month officer cadet training course at Aldershot barracks. They were shouted at from the moment they woke. They ran everywhere. They spent hours at a time on the parade ground, until they wheeled and turned like puppets on the sergeant major's string. They were run through gyms, vaulted over horses, sent up ropes, swung their arms from rafters and verbally abused for twenty-four hours every day, seven days a week, with Sunday's only pleasure a visit to the church for church parade where their buttons and boots shone from their own spit and polish. The worst for Jack was the four hours' sleep.
Slowly his body went from a sea of pain to something close to feeling strong. But lack of sleep was Jack's torture. Not the map-reading; machine-gun drill; stripping the guns; putting them back together; firing them, running like hell in between; the lectures; the desperate need to concentrate. All Jack wanted to do as the days went on and on into one long nightmare, was sleep. Four hours a day. It was torture. His previous life, all of it, had vanished from his mind.
When Jack passed out as an acting second lieutenant, in front of some major general he was never again to see in his life, Fay would not have recognised her lover. The eyes, dulled from good food and good wine, were alive and bright. His hair was cut so short it had not been necessary to hide his grey hairs. The pip on either shoulder denoting his new rank, was the greatest achievement in his life. Out of a course of one hundred and thirty-seven men, Jack was fifteenth in the class. Most of the men were ten or more years his junior. Best of all, he had made more good friends in three months than in the previous years of his life. And his old school friend Jeremy Flagstaff had been right. He felt and looked ten years younger.
On the noticeboard at the drinks party to celebrate their new commissions were their postings. All of them had been given seven days' leave. Jack had been posted to the East Surrey Regiment, somewhere in Belgium. In a week's time he would be told exactly where he was to go.
From Aldershot, Jack took the train up to London. Instead of going home he went straight to Paddington. They had not seen each other since the night he had fallen asleep in the chair. His solicitor took care of the bills. As required by regimental standing orders, Jack was in uniform, the same shabby uniform he had worn as an officer cadet, with the rank and badge insignia changed. He was looking forward to visiting his tailor. Then he would appear in full rig, keeping his battledress for the rigours of war. He thought he deserved something for all the pain they had inflicted on his body.
Only when he rang the doorbell to Fay's small flat did he realise he had not been bored once in all the three months. Not having any time to waste, he took his mistress straight to bed. She was prettier than he had even imagined.
"Oh, Jack, what have you been doing," she screamed with pleasure.
They spent the whole week together, not even going out to a restaurant. Jack had his cook from Baker Street bring over the food and leave it in the kitchen, having cleaned up the mess from the previous day. They both called at his tailor for his new uniform, holding hands all the way in the taxi. Everywhere they looked men were in uniform. The Union Jacks of summer were nowhere to be seen. Once they went to a music hall at the Windmill Theatre, the day Jack walked down Savile Row in his going out uniform, his number one. In addition, he had had a monkey jacket made for the formal mess evenings, the equivalent of civilian evening dress. He looked like a new pin, brushed and scrubbed. Jack smiled at everyone to hide the turmoil building in his stomach as the week reached its conclusion. Then he was at Paddington station, full of soldiers, and saluted. The engine belched white smoke under the great canopy of the railway station and he was waving her goodbye.
Fay went back to the flat and the mess in the kitchen she would have to clean up herself. She couldn't imagine the snooty cook bringing her anything. He had gone.
Under the high double bed with the side drapes down to the floor was the old trunk from another life. It was all she had left of her family. All the things that had belonged to her mother. She pulled out the wooden trunk with the old iron hoops and studs and brought it through to the sitting room. Fay was frightened of the trunk. With the big iron key she had hidden beneath her clothes in the cupboard she turned the old lock and heard it snap open. Then she lifted up the heavy lid and looked inside, picking up some of the pieces and dropping them back into the
trunk, conjuring the picture of her mother into her mind. For a long ten minutes, she knelt beside the open trunk with her eyes closed. When she opened them, her small, dark eyes were looking inwards. Her sharp almost beaked nose was thinner than usual, the nostrils dilated. Then, long and practised fingers moved inside the old trunk and took out the items of the trade. First, she wound her mother's blue scarf, almost transparent, around the top of her head and tied it at the back, a line of swirling material falling down her back. Then she put on the silk gown that fell to the floor and tied a belt around her waist. Then the pointed shoes. Long earrings for her ears. A small black patch for the height of her left cheek. Bracelets of brass and silver up her sleeves. Then the solemn blue band around her forehead.
She walked quietly through to the full-length mirror in the bedroom.
"Hello, mother," she said softly, and not even Jack Merryweather would have recognised her voice.
Their name had not been Wheels. That had come from the wagon, and the constantly turning wheels that by the law of the land sent them round and round England, winter and summer, sunshine and snow. They were Romany. Gypsies. Not allowed to stay anywhere longer than a week.
Back in the early part of the previous century, their ancestors had travelled from central Europe to find a place that would let them live in peace. Some said they came from the plains of Asia, others that they were Russian. Others said a mix of many cultures. Whatever they were, they had been chased from pillar to post for as long as the collective memory could remember.
If anyone found out Fay was a gypsy, they would chase her out into the cold street and tell her to keep moving. She had told Jack when he found her wandering the streets around Baker Street. She was then just seventeen, alone in the world, cast out by her own people after the fight that had killed her family. She had run away to London, frightened for her life.
They had followed the circus the length and breadth of England, the gypsies keeping to themselves, their ornate wooden caravans pulled by big carthorses that were fussed over as much as the children. The circus went from county fair to county fair. There was work for tinkers, fixing the pots and pans of the rural villages, sharpening knives. And telling fortunes. Fay thought her mother an act as a way of making pennies. The gypsies were thieves and under their strange clothes was hidden all manner of vile disease. You only had to look into the eyes of a gypsy and see the dark side of life, the evil haunted spirit of the damned, unbelievers, cursed by God to wander for their unnatural span of their lives, feared by honest, God-fearing folk. Even Fay as a child had learned never to look into a villager's eyes. In the winters, they camped in barren fields beneath the leafless trees, always on the move. Shunned. Always shunned.
