‘That’s a shame.’
‘Not just for the husband, but for him as well.’ The woman gestured towards a memorial by the church entrance.
There was Seth Pye, inscribed between the names of sixty other men who had died in the Great War. Charlie wondered who would fill the spare bowl of soup now that Mary Pye was gone.
To his surprise, Jack, Marx and Engels turned up for the Anglican service. They stood at the back, cloth caps in hand. Georgina sat in the first row, wearing a stiff black dress that emphasized her ample bosom.
Charlie had never been to a church service and was surprised by the way it went on and on. Hymns, prayers, the sermon: ‘. . . and Jesus Christ our Saviour . . . our dear sister . . . in heaven as on earth . . . How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!’
Once he glanced towards the back and caught Jack singing along. Georgina looked rather sweet with her round rosy cheeks and her lips pursed in earnest piety. Her blond hair was tucked under some sort of black bonnet, which gave her the air of a young widow.
Finally the hymns and preaching ceased.
‘Let us stand in silence and remember the life of Mary Pye, our dear cousin, aunt, and friend,’ the vicar said.
Charlie stood up, rather relieved to have reached a familiar part in the proceedings. He closed his eyes and settled into the silence. He thought of Seth and the other men from the memorial. He thought of Mr and Mrs Pye – you never saw such a loving wife – raising their son in this little town where people could be rather strict. He thought of the Mary Pye who had lost her son, sitting in Silent Meeting in London, and he wished what one always wished on these occasions, that he had spent more time with her instead of always trying to . . .
‘And now let us sing hymn number twenty seven,’ the vicar said. ‘“Abide with Me”.’
The congregation burst into song. ‘. . . fast falls the eventide.’ Charlie stood half perplexed, half amused. ‘The darkness deepens . . .’ Was this what a service in the steeple-house was like then? ‘Lord, with me abide.’ One minute to remember eighty years lived on this earth?
For the first time in his life he felt a deep yearning for silence.
4
They set off early.
‘Last week I killed three hundred and fifty-seven rats,’ Georgina told Charlie, who was putting on his boots. She adjusted her land girl cap. ‘In one week alone. Three hundred rats can eat three tons of wheat a year, did you know?’
‘Fancy that,’ said Charlie, down on one knee, his fingers stiffly fumbling with the laces. Her breeches were rather tight around her buttocks.
‘Fancy it,’ she said, and nudged him out the door.
He carried her bag for her, an unwieldy knapsack filled with instruments he would rather not think about. They strode towards a glum brown cottage. Georgina whistled a tune, Charlie whistled along. The farmer’s wife was waiting for them in the kitchen with steaming bowls of porridge.
There were two ways to kill rats, Georgina said between hasty spoonsful of porridge, her head dipped close to the bowl. One was neat and one was messy. The neat one was to find all their escape holes, plug them securely except for one, then pump in gas through the one remaining hole into their burrows. That way they died underground and one didn’t have to fuss over the corpses. In a bumpy field like this one, however, finding the holes would take all day, and it was better to use the other method.
‘Which is more fun anyway,’ she said, pushing aside her empty bowl and licking her lips. ‘Stuffing all the holes one by one is such a bore. As long as there are enough people to help out, I far prefer the messy way.’
They went outside, and Georgina efficiently instructed the assembled farm hands, even turning the scrawny, sullen farmer himself into an attentively listening schoolboy. She handed each of them a shovel. Charlie made no move to take one, and she frowned and said: ‘Have you just come to watch, then?’
‘Of course not.’ He picked one of the smaller shovels. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jack arrive, carrying a spade over his shoulder.
Following Georgina’s orders, they swarmed out over the freshly mown hay field and took their positions. Georgina had lugged a canister and a long black tube across the ground. She wedged the canister between her knees, squatted down a little with her shoulders leaning forward and her bottom sticking out, and began pumping gas into a hole. Charlie averted his eyes, forcing himself to focus on the horizon and the oak trees in the distance. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and breathed on his reddened hands to warm himself.
The first terrified squeak made him jump.
There was another, louder squeak, and then another.
The rats were fleeing their burrows, sleek grey torpedoes darting across the field in terror. The farm hands hopped about, lifted their feet in their heavy boots and stomped and whacked the rats to death.
Georgina let go of the pump and leaped across the field like a dervish, lifted her shovel high and cracked it down on a rat, and another one, and another one, until the scurrying stopped and limp fat bodies with half-open snouts and broken backbones dotted the mown earth.
Charlie feebly whacked a few clumps of earth and weeds and hoped no one noticed.
‘What’s that you’re doing, a spot of gardening?’ Jack stood behind him. He lifted his spade and brought it down on a lone rat that was racing towards his boots. The rat let out a squeak, and Jack struck it again, and again, until it was a squashed lump. ‘That’s how I like my gardening.’
When they cleared away the dead rats, Georgina exclaimed: ‘Three tons of wheat, think how many loaves that makes!’
‘Plenty,’ Charlie said, and thought he might throw up.
Georgina playfully picked up a rat by its hind legs and tossed it at him. He dodged it but was too slow. It hit his thigh and left a dark smear on his breeches.
‘What a girl you are,’ she said, and giggled.
‘Astonishing,’ was all Charlie could muster.
They washed their hands in the cold kitchen, where the farmer’s wife had laid out bread, cheese and pickles. Charlie told himself he ought not to have any appetite after the massacre, but in truth he felt as ravenous as a starved rat. He cut off a big chunk of cheese, slapped it on a slice of bread with some pickle, devoured it, and when he had filled his stomach, he wiped his sticky hands on his thighs, leaving a pickle smudge next to the rat blood.
Press Barons
1
Paul gave his clean clothes to a guard at Wormwood Scrubs and was given a set of dirty prison clothes in return, like a laundry in reverse. He was allowed to take his Bible with him. When he entered his cell he could not help but think that his father had in fact wanted this for him, that this was somehow the most Quakerly of experiences. They believed in plainness and his new life could not be plainer. Here he possessed nothing but a spoon, a bowl, a towel and a brush, all of which he expected to lose to a stronger, more violent inmate at any moment. The one window was so high up he could not look outside. The straw palliasse on the metal frame had been thinned by many restless bodies.
However, Paul lacked the one resource that would have made all this bearable. His conscience had none of the clarity and strength that had fortified the early Quakers. He had lied to Miriam, he had betrayed both the pledge and the peace testimony to win her affection, and when his time had come to defend his stance before the tribunal, he had lazily parroted a Bible quote. His punishment was all the worse for being fully deserved. ‘I joyfully entered prisons as palaces,’ Margaret Fell had written in her journal, ‘telling mine enemies to hold me there as long as they could, and in the prison-house I sung praises to my God.’ Well, he did not feel like singing praises. He certainly did not feel joyful. He felt like a fool.
His anger was like a trapped animal that threw itself against the bars of its cage: now it threw itself against Miriam for having lured him into lying, now against the judges for having tric
ked him, now against his father and Charlie for having failed to advise him well. But the real target of the anger lay beyond those bars and was Paul himself.
That night he read the three chapters of Joel and constructed a response that would have left his judge roundly defeated. ‘Let the weak say, I am strong,’ Joel wrote: and in another passage, ‘My great army . . . will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten’. In his imaginary response, Paul argued convincingly that there were peaceful, Gandhian ways of strengthening the weak; and that the great army was a metaphor for the restorative effect of faith.
‘I see you have spent a great amount of thought on this, Mr Lamb,’ the judge said in this satisfying script. ‘It is rare to find such depth, faith and courage in a man of your age.’
But he had not said that. It was nothing but a script. It had not happened.
The bars of the cage gave way, and anger and shame burst out in hard, furious sobs. He had wanted it so much. He had wanted to say the right thing to Miriam, and the right thing to the judges, and the right thing to his father. He had wanted to be admired and respected by them all and despised by none. He had wanted to oppose the war, yet do his bit. He had wanted to be a good Quaker and a war hero.
King David had started out as a shepherd who played the harp and carried ten cheeses to a camp of soldiers. He felled Goliath and smote the Philistines, just like Miriam had said, but then he had done something else, Paul remembered it now: there was an incident in King David’s old age that he really ought to have brought up at his tribunal. Yet nowhere in the pages of the Books of Kings could he find the incident he was looking for, and he wondered whether Mary Pye had perhaps made it up.
He fell asleep with the Bible on his chest and dreamed of a great locust eating up his years.
*
The next day they moved Paul into a cell with a bunk bed. The upper bunk stayed empty. It surprised him, since the gaol was clearly overcrowded. Still, it was a relief. The cell was dark and cramped, a concrete box with a window so high up he could not see outside, but at least there was no one to harass him. He had heard that one of the most basic rules in gaol was never to ask any of the inmates about their crimes. Yet all the men who shouldered past him in the corridor, who took the full bowl of porridge from his hands as if it had been offered to them, seemed to know why he was there. Some of them were tense, quick and scrawny, the type who would be good with a knife. Others clearly needed nothing more than their rake-sized hands to smash a face or wring a neck. Had Paul met them on a dark street in Highgate, he would have crossed to the other side or sought safety in the next pub. Here, there was no avoiding them.
He started out with a towel, a bowl, a brush and a spoon. Soon he had only a bowl, a brush and a spoon. Then, only a bowl and a spoon.
His father sent him buttons and lavender soap and advised him to use these as currency. He also told him to find other conchies in his wing – other Quakers, ideally – and gather every night for Quiet Meeting.
‘Thank you,’ Paul wrote, ‘but there are no other conchies here. Yes, I’m surprised, too.’
The buttons and lavender soap bought him some protection. He took the fact that they left him his bowl and spoon as a kindness, until he discovered the real reason: without a bowl, he would not be served porridge, and if he wasn’t served porridge, he couldn’t give half of it to whoever was standing behind him in the queue.
*
The screws locked all the cells, then hurried into their shelters. Paul lay there, locked up, listening out for enemy planes. In the next cell, a man began to scream with the rise and fall of an air-raid siren: ‘Let me owwww-t! Let me owwww-t!’
There followed a terrible rhythmic series of thuds. Paul could not make out what they were. Someone banging his fist against the wall, probably.
‘Let me owwww-t! Let me owwww-t!’
Thud, thud, thud.
Then he heard the raiders. There was something so personal about a raid. He knew, of course, that there were hundreds of German bombers and hundreds of targets, and how they matched up was a matter of gravity, wind and luck. And yet, when he heard the raiders overhead, the roar of their engines growled, Where are you? Where are you? We will find you! We will find you!
He pressed his face into the crook of his arm as if that would make him invisible.
If only that awful thudding noise would stop.
2
‘We found a pal for you.’ The guard grinned and shoved a carefully groomed, dark-skinned man into the cell. Paul recognized the Hindu he had talked to before his tribunal.
‘Chatterjee!’
‘Have we met?’
‘The court house in Bloomsbury. We were waiting for our tribunals.’ It was beyond Paul how anyone could fail to have every single detail of that infernal day carved into his mind. ‘You were advising me on my defence.’
‘Why, of course! The Quaker.’ Chatterjee raked his thick black hair with his fingers as if to stimulate his brain. Neither the cell nor their dirty uniforms seemed to make the slightest impression on him: he moved with the lazy confidence of a gentleman at his club. Paul half expected him to turn round and ask a waiter to fetch his coat. ‘You must forgive me, but I’ve forgotten your name. I think it’s this diet of cocoa; what a thing to give to anyone over five. We are all steadily regressing towards infancy in here; another month and I shall be rocking to and fro on my back. Was my advice of any use?’
‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ Paul said politely. ‘Though I failed my tribunal, as you can see. Paul Lamb.’
‘The sacrificial Lamb! Now I remember everything.’
There was something about Chatterjee that reminded Paul of Charlie. Perhaps it was the way he wore his grey prison uniform, with the dishevelled charm of a pair of daytime pyjamas. He settled down on the lower bunk with his back slouched against the wall, one leg casually draped over the other.
‘How about your own tribunal?’ Paul asked. ‘I assume . . .’ He glanced up at the barred window.
‘You assume it didn’t go all that well? In a way, you assume correctly. It didn’t go all that well for the judges.’ Chatterjee lifted a forefinger to emphasize his point. ‘Can you see what I’m doing here? It’s a theory I’m in the process of developing. For now I’m calling it “systemic reversal”. If you think of yourself as a failure, my dear Lamb, you will be a failure. But if you think of the system as a failure – with the judges failing to recognize and appreciate your argument – then . . .’ He paused importantly, raising his elegantly arched black eyebrows. ‘I leave you to draw your own conclusions.’
‘I see,’ Paul said.
Chatterjee grinned. ‘I apologize, I did not intend to confuse you.’
‘Oh, not at all, it’s just . . . I’m impressed you can even think about theories. All I can think of is – I don’t know – how nice it would be to have a toothbrush.’
‘Ha! Let’s see . . . they gave me a brush with a wooden back.’ Chatterjee inspected the pillowcase that held his belongings, took out a brush and turned it in his hand. ‘The question is, hair or boots?’
‘I’d say boots,’ Paul ventured.
‘I’d say hair, but I can see that if in doubt, one might want to opt for boots. Which means I’ll have to wheedle a comb off someone who is about to be discharged. I’ve already noticed quite a few who scratch their scalps; those certainly won’t do. Not to worry, we’ll find a toothbrush. I also need some buttons.’
‘My father sends me buttons, but the men always steal them.’
‘And you let them?’
‘There doesn’t seem to be any alternative.’
‘Thank goodness we won’t have to rely on Quakers for the revolution. I’ve been to this place before, you see. Let me introduce you to the house rules. Here’s what you do. The next time someone as much as touches one of your buttons, you take your spoon like this’ – he closed his long fingers around the concave end – ‘and then, my frie
nd, you drive the handle right into his eye.’
*
After a week, Chatterjee had organized toothbrushes for both of them. It was a mystery to Paul how he had succeeded in drawing a boundary around himself in the space of only a few days. There were men who were stronger than Chatterjee and men who were more overtly aggressive, but Chatterjee kept them at bay with a mere glimpse of something unstable and menacing under his affable veneer. He and Paul sat alone at the far end of the long table in the canteen and ate their porridge together.
‘You see, I was utterly truthful at my tribunal,’ Chatterjee said. ‘I told them they could do me no greater favour than throwing me into gaol. What a tremendous chance to build up an army of criminals for the revolution! What revolution? they asked. Any, I replied. Communist, anarchist, nihilist, the label is of no importance, it’s the energy unleashed by the great chaos of transition that matters. The idea terrified them, of course, and what did they do in their terror? They threw me into gaol! Panic wrestled logic and pushed it to the ground. I find it very entertaining, the things men do when they panic. It always reminds me of the time I watched a horse in a burning stable. It ran round and round in circles even though the door was open.’ He laughed, and ate some porridge, and laughed again at the recollection.
When they returned to their cell, Paul asked: ‘But it got out in the end, didn’t it?’
‘What did?’
‘The horse. The one that was trapped in the stable.’
‘No.’ Chatterjee carefully wiped his hands on a flannel. ‘I’m afraid it didn’t. Daft creature.’ He sighed and tossed the flannel into a corner. ‘But what can I say, the door was open.’
In the afternoons, Chatterjee liked to lie on the top bunk and read a book, all the while letting out an incessant stream of patter.
‘Have you been to the library? You need to bribe the guard. I like to think of it as a subscription fee. Most of the books are of the opium variety – you may, of course, be perfectly satisfied with that. What’s that you’re reading? I see. Opium!’
Of Love and Other Wars Page 14
