Charlotte and Henry were killed in a train crash in October 1947. Robert had just died, you were 14 months old and I was adrift even before the knock on the door. When I saw the police officers’ silhouettes through the glass, I felt the strongest urge to run away. I didn’t want to open that door. I was already at breaking point. I must have squeezed you too hard because I remember you started squealing in my arms. Your wriggling pulled me back. There were two officers, a woman and a man. They took me to the front room, made me sit down and then the lady took you from me and sat you on the carpet at her feet. She found one of your teddies and gave it to you and so when I remember being told that my parents had been killed in a train crash, all I see is your face, wide-eyed, smiling and staring at me above the button eyes of that grey woollen teddy we gave you for your first Christmas.
I couldn’t breathe. The lady officer rose swiftly from her chair and stepped carefully over you, reaching her hand towards me. I must have fainted then. I woke up hours later in my bed. My first thought was for you and I half-rose to come and find you but then I remembered the rest. I fell back onto the pillows, unable to breathe again. I couldn’t think what to do. I was utterly lost.
My poor parents, who had seen so much, died because a young signalman didn’t see enough on a foggy day in South Croydon. They were travelling to the funeral of one of the men who had served with Henry. The signalman, who was new to the job, forgot there was a train already in that section of the line. Normally, a safety system should have prevented him from letting another train in but he thought the system was broken and overrode it. The two trains crashed into each other and 32 people were killed. Such a small number given the two dreadful wars that had dominated the past three decades, but for me this tiny tragedy was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The Great War stole my father’s spark before I could really know him. Barely 20 years later, another war took my husband but what really reconfigured my soul was the death of my parents because of one young man’s miscalculation. Henry was 57. It was considered a long life then but my goodness, how I regret his young death from where I stand now. Many of the men who survived the war with him had already passed on, some succumbing to illnesses that could be traced back to those sinister yellow clouds that drifted over their trenches, while others were smothered by unutterable burdens of grief or guilt. They carried these leaden loads for decades, as Henry had, while they raised their families and tried to get on with their lives. But the day came when they were no longer needed, or so they thought, and then many quietly checked out. Henry might have been tempted to do the same but I think he sensed that Charlotte would always need him. She seemed the stronger of the two but if there is one thing I have learned in my 70-odd years here, Diane, it is that what lies beneath is what counts. Charlotte needed Henry as much as he needed her. Her strength came from his need.
You’re probably wondering if I am projecting my own relationship with your father onto my parents. There were, of course, similarities – war, damage, fractured souls and lives. But just as no two people see a robin in the same way, no two people experience war in the same way. It is not a static, unitary object or state. It is shaped by those who live it, by their strengths and weaknesses, by what they can and cannot bear.
Charlotte was 50 when she died. The last time I saw her she was reaching for Henry’s hand as they walked down the path from our home. They had come for tea and to tell me they were going to London for a few days to attend the funeral. She was wearing her brown coat and a maroon hat. I watched as Henry let her take his hand just before they reached the gate. His fingers curled around hers. I can see it as though it was yesterday. I like to think they were still holding hands when the end came. I realise this is an unforgivably maudlin thought but even an old cynic like myself needs fairy tales sometimes.
CHAPTER 5
It is time to let Henry speak for himself. Only he can bear true witness to his experience. I have seen my share of war. I endured the Second World War and I will tell you of that. I have seen war in Korea and Vietnam and other smaller conflicts. I have spoken to people on all sides and then I have relived the pain and the absurdities, through a glass darkly, in my writing. But I have never been a soldier and although I am willing to undertake any feat of imagination if I think I can pull it off, in this case I neither think I can, nor is it necessary.
As I sorted, tight-throated and scratchy-eyed, through my parents’ things just days after they died, I found a letter Henry had written in 1916 but never sent. It was in the breast pocket of the khaki wool tunic he was wearing when he returned to Britain. The tunic had never been cleaned. What would have been the point? There was still dried mud on the collar and around the hem. One of the brass buttons was missing. The tunic must have hung silently in that mildewed wardrobe in my parents’ house for decades, a deflated reminder of absent bodies.
I took the tunic down into the kitchen, wondering what I should do with it. Would it be appropriate to wash it and give it to a charity? It seemed wrong somehow to treat it as just another item of clothing. Could I bear to keep it knowing that this uniform and all it stood for had destroyed my father’s life, and indeed my own? Then I found the letter – a tightly folded square of unlined white paper. It had the rigidity of something long unopened and that’s why I believe Charlotte never saw it. She would certainly not have left it in the jacket for fear Henry might stumble on it again.
I sat down slowly at the kitchen table, taking my usual chair although I could have had my choice of any. My back was to the window and I was facing Charlotte’s empty seat. I closed my eyes to better imagine her sitting there, calmly sipping her tea, her cat’s eyes warming my face like an embrace. I knew what was coming would hurt, as you know in the millisecond between your foot hitting an uneven paving stone and the fall that it will hurt. Even today, there is a composite kitchen smell – a hint of chicken dinner, hot milk and the lingering trace of Charlotte’s lavender-scented hand soap – that catapults me back to that moment. I was still utterly discombobulated by grief. At night, lying beside you in our double bed, I could hear my soul splintering, like a giant iceberg wailing its disintegration into an empty Arctic sky. But we don’t die from blistered souls or broken hearts. More’s the pity. There was nothing actually wrong with me and so I went on. I could do nothing else. I did not have the courage then to act against myself. I never have.
I knew the letter would deepen my anguish but I knew too that it had to be read. It was not very long but it took me some time to get to the end. Each word flayed my exhausted brain. I am sharing this letter with you, Diane, because you deserve to know and Henry deserves to be heard. I have never shown this letter to anyone. Now, it is yours.
October 4, 1916
Dearest Lottie,
What does it mean to live? I am lying here in this stinking hole, my back to the wall, my knees to my chest and I can’t work it out. Maybe there is no answer. Maybe the very idea that there should be an answer just shows how arrogant we are. We dare to assume our lives mean something. Why should they? Because we are human? But what does that mean? I don’t know any more. Who is it that said: “To err is human, to forgive divine”? I can’t remember but all I see now are our errors. Is that it? Is that all being human means? There is no shortage of errors out here but there is nothing divine as far as the eye can see. The idea of a God makes me laugh when it doesn’t make me cry.
Something terrible happened, Lottie. It has taken me three days to be able to even write about it. You know me. I don’t have your gift for words but someone needs to bear witness to what we did. What we were made to do. No, that’s not fair. What we did. We always have a choice.
Sally Betts’ brother showed up here in the middle of August. I don’t know if you knew that? He was assigned to our unit, or rather flung into the muck alongside the rest of us.
When I first saw him, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out who he was. I recognised his blue eyes and the sandy lashes,
that funny upturned nose and the way dimples appeared when he smiled. I knew the face but it was in the wrong place. When I finally got it, I yelled out “Bettsy! Daniel Betts! What are you doing here, you blighter?”
It wasn’t just that he was out of place. He was too young to be on the frontline. He told me he’d lied to the recruiter, saying he was 19 instead of 16. He was always tall for his age and I’m sure the recruiter was happy to turn a blind eye and squirrel away a few more bob for signing up another one. Bettsy had done a few weeks of basic training and here he was on the Somme, full of laughs and larks the way the new boys always are. The laughs didn’t last long though. None of us are laughing any more. You’ll know I suppose that we’ve been fighting here since July and all of us have lost friends to the bombs and the diseases and the Great Fuck Up as we call it. I’m sorry to use such language but it’s the truth. Some men simply passed away in the mud at night and I honestly believe it was nothing but downright misery that killed them. They were the really strong ones, the ones who could will themselves out of it, who refused to go on. I envied every one of them. I know that sounds terrible but it’s true.
I was beside Bettsy when he copped his first big barrage. When the guns kicked off, he flinched – we all do, every time, no matter how long we’ve been here – but he said nothing at first. His jaw just tightened and he pulled his helmet lower and crouched into himself. It’s the sound, Lottie. The sheer scale of it. It’s like the world is breaking. It’d turn you to jelly even if you weren’t stuck in a trench, waiting to die. That sounds like I’m over-egging it but I promise you, I’m not. We’re just waiting to die. Every day, men are blasted to bits where they crouch, reading, carving pretty flowers into shell cases, playing cards, smoking or making tea. One minute, they’re beside you, talking away, and the next minute, you’re wiping bits of them out of your hair. Over here, we’re like ants. Our lives, our deaths mean just as little. We disappear without a trace. But I suppose the Huns feel the same so the question is, whose boots are crushing us all?
“It’s the sound, isn’t it? I didn’t know it would be so bloody loud,” Bettsy shouted. After that he went quiet until the guns fell silent and then he asked me for a smoke. His hands were trembling but so were mine. You don’t pay any attention to things like that here. If it’s not the cold making you shake, it’s the fear.
Bettsy stayed with us for a few weeks but then he was sent off to another section after they lost a lot of men when the Germans tried to break through the lines. To be honest, I didn’t think about him much after that. You can’t let yourself worry about the other ants. You’d go mad. Thinking about Bettsy would bring me back to those months in St Albans, when I lodged with his family and met you, and I try not to think of that other world. It’d be like imagining a slap-up meal when you’re starving. I’ve stopped that too. Sometimes I don’t even dare think of you, Lottie. It’s too painful and I’m scared that if I remember too much, I’ll get lost inside my head. If I think of how you looked that day in Sally’s garden, if I remember how your skin smells of lavender, or how your hair curls into little ringlets by your ears when the air is damp, I might never be able to find my way back to this bloody grey world where the only smell is death and the only colour the red of spilt blood and guts and those bleeding poppies. I’ve seen enough men get lost in their heads to know that that is no way to survive either. You can’t even be safe inside your head here.
I saw Bettsy again a few days ago. Me and some of the boys were told to move back to a village about two miles behind the frontline. We didn’t know why and we didn’t ask. That’s what war has done to us, Lottie: killed our curiosity. Better not to know what’s coming. It’s never something good and there’s nothing we can do anyway.
We were ordered to stop at a farm on the north side of the village. There were purple and crimson roses climbing around the door of the farmhouse and I sat on the brown grass staring at them while we waited for the brass. I hadn’t seen anything so beautiful for months. They must’ve been those winter roses to be blooming so late. I was just getting up to run my fingers over the petals when the Captain came over and we all stood to attention. Not as fast as we used to but we stood nonetheless. He told us we were going to form an execution squad at dawn the next day. Nobody moved, nobody said anything and he dismissed us to prepare our sleeping area. When he was halfway across the garden, heading for his car, another lad, you don’t know him and I might not for long so his name doesn’t matter, called out: “What did he do, Sir? The lad we’re going to shoot?”
The Captain slowed his march but he didn’t stop or turn around.
“Cowardice,” he shouted back. “He abandoned his sentry post and not for the first time. Damn fool, but there’s nothing anyone can do for him now.”
That night we bunked down among the mildewed, scratchy bales of hay in the barn. I should’ve slept like a baby in all that luxury even if I’d brought my old friends, the lice, with me. But I couldn’t. It’s hard to explain, Lottie, but death can still shock even after all these months. What I mean is: we’re here to kill and we do kill some days although most days we just try not to die but I couldn’t get my head around shooting one of our own. I’d heard about these executions all right. There was another lad, who was shot in March when we were near Wipers. Everyone knew he was a thief and there was even talk he’d done something to one of the French girls in the village. I didn’t see the execution anyway. I just heard about it and shook it off. Otherwise you’d go mad. But this was different, Lottie. I didn’t want to do it. It didn’t feel right.
We were woken before dawn and told to go behind the barn. Someone had stuck a pole into a small hill midway between the barn and the back wall of the property. We heard a car drive up and the Captain and another soldier appeared around the side of the barn, supporting a young lad between them. His feet dragged behind him. He looked drunk. I hoped for his sake he was drunk, poor devil. It wasn’t until they started to tie him to the pole that I realised it was Bettsy. His eyes were half-closed and he seemed to be singing or humming, though it was hard to be sure. As they twisted the ropes around his wrists and ankles, a flock of crows exploded from the trees that rose above the boundary wall, cawing and flapping and making us all jump and squeeze our guns tighter.
A lad beside me whispered: “They sometimes get them drunk to make it easier. If it ever happens to me, that’s how I’d like to go. Drunk as a lord.”
He tried to laugh but it didn’t come out right.
They fixed a white piece of cloth over Bettsy’s heart and then went to tie the blindfold round his eyes but he suddenly raised his head and roared.
“No, no, I don’t want that. I want to see you and I want you all to see me, to know exactly what you’re doing. You don’t get to do this the easy way.”
He looked straight at us then, Lottie, but I don’t think he could make out our faces. We were several yards away and we’d all pulled our scarves around our mouths. I can’t be sure though. I’ll never be sure.
I looked away, up at the sky where a thin line of red was bleeding across the horizon. What would be the point of staring at his young, swollen face? Better not to see what could do no good, I thought. I could do nothing. I might as well have been someone else, someone who didn’t know him. This is what war does, Lottie. It makes us look away, from ourselves, from each other, from what we do, from what we don’t do. We might as well be those ants I was talking about for all the mind we pay to each other out here.
When I dared to look over at him again, Bettsy was slumped, chin on his chest. I hoped he’d fallen asleep. But when the first command rang out, he lifted his head and stared straight ahead, eyes suddenly wide. I swear, Lottie, I was sure he was looking straight at me. That fierce look from a dead man threw me off so that my shot went into the sky above his head. No one hit the white cloth although I saw him jerk when two bullets went into his right arm and right leg. I’d heard tell from other lads that this happened a lot. In the end, me
n just couldn’t bring themselves to deliberately kill one of their own, not after all we went through every day to stay alive.
The Captain stormed to the post where Bettsy was groaning. He pulled out his pistol and for the longest second, they just stared at each other. Then the Captain put his pistol to Bettsy’s temple and fired. When he stomped back past us, his breathing was fast and his eyes were tiny.
“Two days leave for all of you, you useless bastards,” he said.
So we got two days leave, Lottie. For killing Bettsy. Or rather for not even having the guts to kill him but hurting him instead and leaving him to be shot in the head so that he had all the time in the world to feel the terror we all feel every day, but this time knowing there was no curve on the shell that was coming.
I didn’t know what to do after that. I spent most of my two days in the town’s only bar, drinking and brawling until I was kicked out into the street where I looked for a few more fights, found them and then walked four miles back to the front, joining my unit a good five hours before my leave was up so that I was hunkered by the trench wall when the first shells came over the next morning.
I wanted to die. For that first hour, I closed my eyes and waited for the end. I was sure it was time. How could it not be after what we’d done? All Bettsy was guilty of was trying to survive. Why aren’t we allowed to do that any more? Until this war, this madness we all thought would be a jolly adventure, our whole lives were about surviving. We were not raised to walk towards death, placid and uncomplaining like obedient cows. Nothing we did before prepared us for sitting in a hole waiting to die. Lottie, I have seen men walk deliberately into the bullets because each second lived is just another second to fear death.
Whatever made Bettsy do what he did, whether it was the ringing that some men have in their ears, the cries from no man’s land that can last for days, growing fainter and fainter, or the confusion that smothers us all but that some men can’t shake off with a brew and a smoke, whatever it was, he was braver than all of us because he did not walk quietly towards the guns. He made a run for it and we shot him down. We said no to that most basic human instinct, the will to survive. So how can we call ourselves human? All this talk of bravery, nobility, sacrifice. It’s all bloody lies. I’ve no idea what I’m here for, but worse, I don’t even think it matters.
The Reckoning Page 5
