War Stories

by Michael Morpurgo

  Then that afternoon Scott had taken him to the pictures, to one of the big cinemas in Leicester Square. It was a double feature, a cowboy flick with Errol Flynn which hadn’t been very good, and The Maltese Falcon, with Humphrey Bogart, which had been great. He’d even enjoyed the Pathé news for once. The Russians were advancing, it looked like Rome was going to fall soon, and the Yanks were doing all right in the Pacific.

  It had still been light when Jimmy and Scott had emerged from the cinema, a busy late afternoon, Leicester Square crowded with people.

  ‘So what am I going to do with you, Jimmy?’ Scott said softly. ‘You have to go home some time, buddy. Maybe you should give your mom a chance and try talking to her, or ask that nice neighbour lady for help …’

  ‘But even if I do, I still need somebody to protect me from Stan,’ said Jimmy. He had been thinking about what to say all through the film. ‘And I wondered … if you’d come home with me. I mean, you did say that’s what you were here for, didn’t you? To help us Limeys. And I just need some help to make it to Marge’s house without Stan getting hold of me …’ His voice trailed away. His heart was pounding in his chest as he stood watching the American’s face. The young GI looked surprised and for a second Jimmy was sure he was going to say no. But then Scott laughed.

  ‘I can do better than that,’ he said. ‘Let me talk to some of the guys …’

  An hour later Jimmy was on the train back to Catford, but he wasn’t alone. Sitting around him in a small compartment were Scott and the two Airborne guys and the sailor from earlier, as well as the two MPs. They were off duty now, but they were still wearing their white helmets and carrying their billy clubs. One of them was whistling a jaunty tune.

  Jimmy recognized it instantly, a Glenn Miller song. He’d heard it often on the wireless at home, on the American Armed Forces network he and his mum liked to tune in to sometimes. They both loved that big band sound and Glenn Miller was the best. Even Gran thought he was good.

  ‘Hey, that’s “American Patrol”, ain’t it?’ Jimmy said, and grinned.

  ‘Got it in one, kid,’ said the Snowdrop – and winked. ‘That’s us, amigo, the American Patrol, out to pacify the badlands south of the river …’

  Marge was obviously glad to see him, if a bit surprised that he seemed to have acquired his own private American army since he’d disappeared. ‘Blimey,’ she said at the sight of all those Americans in uniform on her doorstep. ‘I thought you lot were supposed to be invading France, not Catford.’

  Jimmy was pleased to see plump, cuddly Marge too, happy to be hugged, eager to tell her what had happened the night before last.

  ‘I always knew that Stan was a bad lot,’ she said, ‘and I told your mum; I said, “Doreen, you’ll rue the day you took up with him.” But it hasn’t been easy for her since your dad died, Jimmy, you must understand that. She’s been very lonely and frightened like the rest of us … but she won’t have anything to do with Stan after this. Not if he’s put you in harm’s way. You matter a lot more to her than somebody like Stan ever could. She’s been frantic, wondering where you were. She’s even been to the police.’

  ‘What about Stan, though, Marge?’ said Jimmy. ‘Did they catch him?’

  ‘Course not,’ Marge said with a snort. ‘You mark my words, he’ll be boozing in the King’s Arms this minute, I expect, same as usual.’

  ‘That’s the pub on the corner, right, ma’am?’ said Scott. Marge and Jimmy nodded. ‘Wait here, kid. This won’t take long. Come on, guys.’

  Jimmy watched the band of Yanks march off up the street in the dirty pink light of a south London sunset – the Snowdrops swinging their billy clubs, all of them looking hard and determined. It seemed only seconds later that Frank shot out of the pub and ran up the street as fast as his legs would carry him, closely followed by an obviously terrified Stan – several very fit young Americans close behind them and gaining all the time.

  No doubt about it, thought Jimmy. This was the best day of his life.

  Four weeks later, on the morning of 6 June 1944, Scott was standing with the rest of his squad in a landing craft, one of the thousands of small boats heading towards the coast of Normandy, the sky above thunderous with the huge barrage from the battleships behind them. Cold sea spray blew in Scott’s face as the boat’s flat bottom hit each successive wave. He and his buddies were soaked already, most of them were seasick and all were afraid. Scott’s stomach churned and he fought not to throw up.

  ‘One hundred yards and closing!’ yelled the bosun at the helm.

  The cold air was rank with the smell of diesel fuel and vomit, and around him Scott could hear guys muttering prayers and the names of loved ones. He said another Hail Mary and thought of his mom and pop and his brothers. Suddenly he thought of Jimmy too, and how that day in London had changed things for them. He hoped the kid was doing OK …

  ‘Fifty yards, and closing!’ the bosun yelled. A fountain of water rose beside the landing craft as a shell exploded, drenching them even more.

  The big fifty-calibre machine-gun mounted on the stern of the landing craft suddenly opened up over Scott’s head, and he could hear enemy rounds pinging into the metal ramp at the front of the landing craft. He ducked, realizing the Germans in the pillboxes above the beach had got their range, and thought how strange it was that people he had never met were shooting at him. He gripped his rifle tighter, tried to swallow and couldn’t, focused on the helmet of the guy standing in front of him.

  ‘Hitting the beach, ramp going DOWN!’ screamed the bosun. Thirty boys ran out of the landing craft, into the withering fire on Omaha Beach.

  The rest, of course, is history.

  Eleanor Updale

  I grew up in a time of peace, but close enough to the end of the Second World War to walk past bomb sites on the way to school. Like the children in this story, we spent every playtime re-enacting the battle against the Germans. At weekends we watched black-and-white war films on our tiny TV sets. Those playground games and films were all about the glamour of death, and it is the dead of the two world wars we count and commemorate every year. Even now, terrorist atrocities are measured by the number of corpses. A bomb that causes only damage and injury will not make it to the top of the news.

  Yet far more people are affected, directly or indirectly, by the mental and physical wounds of conflict. This is the story of one family’s experience and how the scars of war are still visible in the actions and attitudes of later generations. We should remember the survivors. Their agony lives on in unexpected ways.

  I got the idea for this story from talking to my grandmother who, shortly before she died in her nineties, told me the truth about what had happened to my grandfather. After that, I understood all sorts of family quirks.

  This is not her story, but it could be.

  NOT A SCRATCH

  It wasn’t a bullet and it didn’t kill him. At least not right then. Not with the instant force of a hand grenade, or the thrust and twist of a sharpened bayonet. It was a microbe, bred in a corpse and carried in a stream. He didn’t even know it was there, lurking in the water bottle the men passed round as they cowered in their trench, relieved that the shell fire had stopped, thinking that they were the lucky ones.

  Sidney took a swig and settled down with his tattered notebook to compose a letter to a young woman back in Derby. Not to his darling Maudie this time. He would write to her later, reassuring her that he was still alive. This letter was for Archie’s wife – his widow now – to tell her of his brave death, hopelessly charging the enemy lines in the blistering August sun. It was only chance that had put Archie in the line of fire. A couple of inches to the left and Sidney would have taken the bullet. Archie would be writing to Maude now, struggling to find words of comfort and hope.

  Sidney fumbled in his pocket for Maude’s photograph, specially posed at a studio when she heard he was joining up. She had put on the serious look appropriate to the occasion, but he preferred to remember he
r laughing and happy, as she had been nearly two years ago, on the night he’d proposed. They’d been at a party, celebrating New Year’s Eve as 1915 turned into 1916, the year they’d thought must surely see the end of the war. They had sworn to marry as soon as it was all over. It had been a long wait, and there on the battlefield he shut out the filth and the moans of the injured to imagine her as she would look on their wedding day: her jubilant face framed in delicate lace, with just a few soft auburn curls peeping out at the edges. When he was home they would go dancing together, spend Sundays riding their bikes out into the country, swimming in streams and watching romantic sunsets from grassy hills. He would hear her golden laugh again, and she would scream for him to stop as he tickled her when no one was looking. Until then, her grave photograph would bring him luck, as it had in battle after battle so far.

  She had a picture of him, too: strong, healthy and cheekily grinning in his clean uniform; proud to be a soldier at last, setting off to an unknown destination. Maude carried that photo all the time. She had it with her at the station when the remains of his unit returned home, victorious. She thought it might come in handy in case she had to ask someone if they had seen him in the throng of men. It would have been no use. No one could have matched the emaciated body on the stretcher to the virile image on the card. But Sidney recognized Maude. For the first time in the flesh she resembled her picture, and he would get used to that serious look in years to come. But he was one of the lucky ones. Not a scratch, only a spot of dysentery that had scoured his bowels of food and water. He was so weak he couldn’t stand, but he didn’t count as a casualty. He’d survived, uninjured.

  And at first it was a source of pure joy for Maude to see his face, and to watch him fattening up a little under his mother’s care. Maude visited every day after work, and as the wedding approached Sidney’s mother initiated her into some of the more intimate and unpleasant tasks associated with his ‘problem’. It seemed the infection was still there, occasionally flaring up and sending him running to the toilet with painful bloody diarrhoea and vomiting, or ‘d and v’ as they preferred to call it. Sometimes, when things were really bad, the doctor visited. He could barely hide his distaste for Sid’s symptoms, as he scrubbed his hands clean.

  ‘I must be getting on. Just feed him up as best you can. Give him plenty of fluids, to replace what he’s losing. There’s nothing one can do about these bugs from the trenches. Bound to keep flaring up from time to time. Still, he should be grateful. I’m off to see to a man with only one eye – lost half his face at Passchendaele.’

  He opened his bag and took out a bottle of orange liquid. ‘Give him a spoonful of this three times a day. I’ll send my bill round in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, doctor,’ said Maude, as politely as she could, closing the front door behind him. She knew the medicine would be ineffective, and that Sidney, lying weak in the bedroom, had heard the implied criticism – that his illness was less important than the injuries of the ‘real’ casualties. Maude despised the doctor. She resolved to keep out of his way, and to keep the doctor away from Sidney. She would nurse him alone, however unpleasant it might be.

  Sidney’s mother tried to encourage her as they mopped away the evidence of yet another futile dash to the lavatory.

  ‘Don’t worry, dear. It will wear off with time. Just thank the Lord that he’s still here. It’s nothing that a little disinfectant can’t clear up.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Maude bravely, plunging her mop into a bucket of pungent cleaning fluid. ‘It’s a blessing he’s survived.’

  And she meant it, as she prepared for her Boxing Day wedding. It was a quiet affair. She tried not to be disappointed. The girls she’d wanted as her bridesmaids had both lost their boyfriends in the war, and it would have been cruel to celebrate too wildly in front of them. Of course there couldn’t be a honeymoon with Sid unable to travel. So they started married life under her mother-in-law’s roof. No wonder there were no kiddies for five years.

  And in those five years, how things changed. At first there was genuine sympathy from neighbours and old friends. Once Maude even overheard someone praising her devotion to her husband with his embarrassing complaint.

  ‘I don’t know how she does it. She must be a saint.’

  But Maude’s brief glow of pride subsided quickly as the woman continued: ‘I couldn’t live like that. I’d go round there to visit, but I just can’t stand the stench. I can’t bear to see Sid wasting away. He was such a lovely boy.’

  Sid and Maude were together, but the old fun had gone from their lives. They sold the bikes. Sid couldn’t sit in the music hall for long in case he had an ‘attack’; and anyway the old gang, Archie and other friends, were gone. The war, a subject never off people’s lips before 1920, gradually became unmentionable. New acquaintances didn’t want to risk stirring up unknown troubles and a fresh generation of men, too young to have fought, took on the jobs vacated by their older brothers, lying cold in Europe and the east.

  Sid grew stronger, but never strong enough to go back to his old work as a steeplejack, climbing high up church spires to repair their ancient stones, and maintaining factory chimneys across the county. His boss took pity on him and gave him clerical work back at the office, so he would never be far from a toilet and running water, but Sidney wasn’t suited to it. He worked badly, and grew angry with himself and everyone else in the office. It didn’t help that he arrived there every morning already exhausted after a night broken by stomach upsets or wild dreams about the horrors that had killed his mates. So it was no surprise that when the boss died, and his son took over the firm, Sidney was sacked.

  He started on a round of casual work and disappointments. The pay was poor, and Sid had none of the prospects Maude had looked forward to when they’d met. Secretly, she envied Archie’s wife with her widow’s pension. Even more secretly, she coveted the status that came with having lost her man. At that first November remembrance service, a year after the end of the war, the widows were given seats round the temporary wooden memorial. They were still in the front row four years later, when its stone replacement was unveiled. Maude, who had been up half the night scrubbing sheets and was dizzy with pregnancy, still had to stand in the crowd with Sid. She looked at Archie’s widow, elegant in black on her comfortable chair, dabbing her eyes with a lace handkerchief under the sympathetic gaze of the mayor.

  ‘I bet he doesn’t know she’s seeing the butcher from Hatherley,’ thought Maude unkindly, imagining their playful rendezvous by the canal. ‘I wonder what Archie would have had to say to that.’

  The congregation cheered a man with a crutch who hobbled on his one leg to lay a poppy on the cross. There were disdainful mutters when Sid had to leave suddenly before the prayers were over. If only they knew why. But Maude would never say. She had her pride.

  The babies brought a brief interlude of joy. First Eric, then Margaret, rekindled some of the old closeness in the couple. Sidney and Maude laughed together as the children toddled around, rummaged in the dressing-up box, came out with unconsciously funny lines and asked silly questions. But there could be no country picnics, no trips to circuses or the zoo, at least not with Dad. It didn’t matter to the children at first. They loved him as they knew him, and their tight little family was their model for how things should be. But everything changed when they went to school.

  The adult world might have stopped talking about the war, but playground games were still steeped in it. As soon as the children were let out at playtime, they sorted themselves into two groups – the English and the Germans – and set about chasing each other, firing invisible guns and throwing mock grenades (and real punches when the teacher wasn’t looking). On wet days, shut in the classroom at lunchtime, pupils swapped titbits of family history. Eric and Margaret had nothing to offer. Eric tried to get information to share with his friends.

  ‘Was Daddy in the war?’ he asked innocently at tea time.

  ‘Of course he was. Th
at’s why he’s ill,’ snapped Maude. ‘That’s where he picked up the germ that makes him sick. Now eat your food. We don’t want to talk about things like that at the table.’

  Having a dad with an infection didn’t carry much weight in the schoolyard, where other children could boast of dead uncles, or fathers with glamorous wounds, exotic souvenirs taken from German corpses and stirring stories of bravery. Margaret tried to get more information.

  ‘Didn’t you fight at all, Dad?’

  ‘Oh yes, I fought. I marched and charged. I slept in the mud and I watched my comrades fall dead all around me.’ Sidney started to shake, as he remembered appalling sights he would never describe to her tender ears. He stared into the fire, his silence frightening both children. Their mother angrily bundled them from the room.

  ‘Look what you’ve done, asking him all those questions. What do you want to go upsetting him like that for? Don’t you ever let me hear you asking him about the war again.’

  That night, and many nights afterwards, they were woken by the pitiful sound of Sidney squealing and bleating in his sleep. They heard their mother comforting him, or more often shouting at him, telling him not to let his mind stray among things that were in the past and could never be undone. They read the signs. They saw that their father’s frailty made their mother angry, and they knew that she could never let herself admit it. She had to make a show of carrying on. Sid’s illness dominated their lives, but they never spoke about it. They just knew it was embarrassing; that everything to do with the bathroom was secret and shameful, and that all bodies, not just their father’s, were disgusting, disgraceful and bad.

  When Sidney was very sick, the doctor had to come. When he did, Maude regarded the call as an admission of failure: her own personal disgrace. It was the same when Eric or Margaret were ill. They both reached their teens without seeing the inside of the doctor’s surgery, and when Eric was taken to hospital by a teacher after breaking his leg in a football match, he felt more shame than pain. His mother’s distaste for the place when she came to collect him couldn’t be hidden behind her pinched and silent smile.