The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  The best thing about my job at the Ministry in London was that I could go and see my parents regularly. I didn’t always manage to get a rail pass but sometimes I hitched a lift on army trucks heading to the bases north of London. I tried to go as often as I could. I was worried about how this new war would affect their fragile stability. Charlotte and Henry were only middle-aged but even before the war broke out, they seemed older than their years. I fretted about them as one might fret over elderly relatives.

  Henry became increasingly withdrawn as it became clear that the unthinkable was going to happen again. It must have been agonising for him – each new strident exhortation to prepare to defend the country must have felt like a knife twisting in his gut. He had done all he could to banish his memories of the Great War but a critical component of that deliberate amnesia must have been the conviction that such a thing could never happen again. The years of inexorable drift towards another conflict must have seemed like slow torture, and an indictment of his silence.

  On one of my visits, in late 1939, Charlotte whispered that she had cancelled their subscription to the Herts Advertiser to try to spare Henry the daily drip-drip of grim news and stentorian edicts.

  “At least this way, he can eat his breakfast in peace, without all those gloomy headlines, although I shudder to think what my father would’ve said if he’d seen me cancel the paper. Of course, Henry still knows what’s going on. He listens to the wireless until he can bear it no longer and then he stomps off. Whenever he gets really worried, he heads out to the garden and spends hours weeding and pruning. Silver lining, I suppose. By the end of the war, we’ll have prize-winning flowerbeds,” she said, trying to smile.

  “You know, he told me once that he loved gardening because he feels that in some way he’s making up for all the damage done to the earth during the Great War. Of course I can only imagine, but they say parts of France were like a wasteland – not a blade of grass, not a tree left undamaged. Henry said it was almost the worst crime of all. He called it a savaging. No wonder he cannot bear to think about what lies ahead.”

  Henry was not alone. For many people of my parents’ age, the prospect of another war was too awful to consider and so they simply refused to engage. They didn’t sign up for evacuations, they didn’t prepare bomb shelters and they didn’t slaughter their pets in case of gas attacks or bombardment. They stuck their fingers in their ears and their heads in the sand. And until Christmas 1939, you might have thought they were the smart ones. In those first weeks, first months even, people at home in Britain could have been forgiven for thinking that it was all some kind of massive hoax or a Machiavellian publicity stunt to create a feeling of unity in the face of recession.

  Charlotte, though, was not one to ignore reality however hard she worked to transform Henry’s. In September, she joined the Land Army and was immediately assigned to pick potatoes on a farm near Redbourn.

  “The farmer’s two sons joined the RAF and left last week for training in Folkestone,” she told me when I visited her after my WAAF training. “The main crop was ready so it was all hands on deck right away. I thought I was in good shape but it’s very hard work. I think I’d prefer to drive the tractor rather than spend the whole day with my back bent. I’ve asked to be considered for tractor training and I think they might give it to me, what with me being so much older than most of the other girls. They must realise I’ll be more use in the cab rather than puffing and panting in the trenches, as it were. So another silver lining: I might learn to drive.”

  She lifted her hands, turning them over to show me the calluses on her palms and her broken nails.

  “It’ll be easier on my hands as well. My goodness, if my mother could see these. She’d say I was letting myself down, no matter that there’s no time between shifts to do much to fix all this damage. Some of the girls try but they’re younger. They have the energy. And the motivation. I’m well past that now, thank goodness.”

  Charlotte could have sat out this second war but she would never shirk what she saw as her duty. I also believe she felt that this time she could play an active part rather than be forced to watch silently, passively from the sidelines as she had done in 1914. For all I know, she may have seen her new job as a kind of revenge on the Germans and on all those who had stolen her future. A thoroughly genteel revenge.

  She seemed to enjoy her new outdoor life. It allowed her to channel all her buried angst and fear into physical labour rather than standing at the kitchen window, watching Henry pulling up weeds with a grim, cheerless determination. After joining the Land Army, she also cut down her drinking. I think she enjoyed spending time with young, relatively carefree women – girls my age who laughed and sang and curled their hair and worried about getting too sunburnt even as they worked hard and silently prayed for their brothers, fathers and lovers. Their gaiety took the edge off the daily terrifying tedium of living through another war.

  Charlotte also relished her role as mother figure to this new generation. It was in her nature to want to protect them.

  “I feel like God when Jesus asked him to take the cup. Remember, in the Garden of Gethsemane?” she said one day as we drank tea after her shift.

  I shook my head. My parents had never properly introduced me to religion. By the time I came along whatever faith they once had was largely destroyed, although I often wondered if Charlotte played along with that too for Henry’s sake. If he felt God had abandoned him, she perhaps nurtured an unspoken belief that a divine hand had brought Henry home. Both points of view are understandable. How could Henry believe in a merciful God after what he had seen? How could Charlotte not after her man made it home when so many didn’t? Faith is so subjective. In any case, Henry’s faith was always something of a social convenience while Charlotte was raised a Catholic. On her dressing table, she had a picture of her first communion – it shows a big-eyed, solemn nine-year-old, standing stiffly in a doily of a dress. That picture breaks my heart. I wish that little girl could have had a better life. Charlotte would have tut-tutted and said she had a fine life. We would both be right.

  “Jesus asked his father to spare him the suffering that was coming,” Charlotte went on. “Of course, God could not if mankind was to be saved but, as a father, he must have desperately wanted to. In the same way, I can’t take this cup from my Land Girls but I can try to help them get through what’s coming. I know I haven’t got much to offer but just being with them seems to help. If nothing else, they can see I survived the last one. That cheers them up. After all, I’m nothing special. If I can survive, then anyone can.”

  “It won’t be the same this time,” I said, selfishly unable to spare her my fears. “Hitler is going to attack us and hard. Everyone says so. This time we won’t be able to sit out the war at home. Everyone at the Ministry says we are going to have a bad time of it although Lord knows, that’s not what we put on the posters.”

  Charlotte sighed.

  “I know. I wanted to get one of those Anderson shelters to put in the garden but every time I try to discuss it with Henry, he shuts down completely. It would be useless in any case. There’s no way I’d be able to get him underground again. He cannot abide small spaces. He says that being in the trenches was like being buried alive. He felt like a rat. He’ll never go underground again. And I suppose we’d also have to tear up his flowers and vegetables to put the shelter down. You put them in the ground, right?”

  “Half in, half out,” I said. “I can send you an instruction leaflet.”

  Charlotte waved her hand dismissively.

  “Henry would rather risk death than dig a hole for a shelter in his garden. We’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope the wind blows the bombs some other way. Or we could try to run to the shelter at Fleetville but I can’t see your father doing that either. And if he stays, I’ll stay.”

  I wanted to hug her but she got up quickly, muttering, “Now, where did I put that yarn I wanted to give you.”

  Charlot
te was on a mission to get me to knit for the soldiers. I drew the line at that. What was coming might prove to be the end of our world and I saw no need to knit while waiting for the apocalypse. I still have those balls of yarn in a bag in my attic – who’s going to want khaki wool nowadays? Maybe I’ll get a cat, just to have something to do with the wool. I wonder if you knit, Diane. I can’t imagine you do but what do I know.

  St Albans was bombed several times – near Clarence Park, off London Road and even our street, Hatfield Road – but the wind was always blowing the right way for my parents. Charlotte stayed with the Land Army throughout the war while my father continued to grow his vegetables and fruit. His own personal Dig for Victory crusade. He despised officialdom and never joined any volunteer force – Charlotte said he would rather die than wear a uniform again – but he often went out walking at night, wandering the blacked-out streets and lanes with a tiny torch clutched in his fist. If he stumbled on the aftermath of a bombing, he would help as much as he could. I wonder now if his withdrawal from society was not the result of fear or post-traumatic stress but instead constituted a deliberate rejection of the institutions and hierarchies that had reduced his generation to cannon fodder. I wish I could have asked him.

  “Survival is so personal,” Charlotte told me when I ranted to her about how dangerous it was for him to be out at night. “I think this is what Henry has to do. Maybe he’s always been stronger than we knew. He’s had the courage to survive, or he’s at least felt obliged to go on. That’s what took him to war in the first place: that sense of duty. But I don’t think he will ever again believe in anything other than his own free will.”

  She paused.

  “Maybe Henry has always been more free than we thought, though God knows, the price he paid was too much.”

  During all this time, Robert was racking up his own bill for the privilege of staying in the world.

  He left England for France in late 1939, sailing from Southampton to Cherbourg to join the men digging trenches along the border between Belgium and France. Another irony: so much of war is construction destined for immediate destruction. I didn’t see him again until after the evacuation from Dunkirk the following May. He was supposed to come home on leave in February but a week before I got a telegram to say he had fallen ill with a fever and would have to rejoin his regiment when he recovered. And all the while, the war spread.

  Unlike the Great War, which stayed largely inside its trench boundaries, this new conflict was like mustard gas. It stole across the world, seeping under doors and into homes, poisoning life everywhere. During the Great War, British officers could leave the front in the morning, get on a train and stroll, dapper and dashing, into their Soho club for dinner. If the Great War introduced ordinary soldiers to a soul-destroying intimate knowledge of what man can do to man, it spared the rest of the population. Our second effort at chaos was much more egalitarian.

  The long-awaited Dunkirk evacuation started on a Sunday. I was in Swiss Cottage with my landlady Michelle Perry, both of us hunched over my Marconi waiting for news of Operation Dynamo. Our heads were bent like fearful churchgoers, avoiding the gaze of a wrathful God. Every hushed breath was a silent prayer for a miracle.

  For a while we held hands – Michelle’s husband was also in France – and when it became clear that men were being saved, we hugged awkwardly before sitting down quickly to resume our vigil. Mercifully, her children – tumble-top girls of five and three – must have sensed the tension and spent most of the morning playing in the back garden. Every so often, Michelle, a sweet dough ball of a girl, jumped up as if she had just remembered her offspring and rushed into the garden to check what they were doing. I heard a few hasty reprimands, a subdued whining and then she was back, slipping into her chair like a guest in her own home.

  “How will we know if our men made it?” she asked, her gentle eyes saucer-wide with the scale of what was happening.

  “The army’ll let us know, I’m sure. If we don’t hear anything today, I can try to find out who we need to contact at work tomorrow,” I said.

  She looked crestfallen. I often forgot that much as I despised the morale-boosting twaddle we churned out at the Ministry, mindless cheer was the people’s opium now. We had them well and truly hooked.

  “But your Joe is sure to be fine,” I said quickly. “Didn’t you tell me he used to sail as a lad? Where was he from again? Somewhere on the coast, right?”

  She nodded. “Cornwall.”

  “So this will be a piece of cake for him. He’ll know what’s going on, he’ll get himself into a good position and before you know it, he’ll be back here under your feet, mucking up the house and you’ll be wishing they’d left him on the beach.”

  Her lips twitched but it was just the shadow of a smile.

  “Be nice to have the bugger back for a while,” she said. “Lord knows, he wasn’t perfect and I had plenty to nag him about but all that doesn’t seem important any more. I guess that’s one good thing to come from all of this. You know what’s what. And you know what’s not.”

  “I should get you to write the Ministry’s posters,” I said. “You’re a dab hand, Michelle.”

  She dared a tiny giggle but then we heard the familiar putter of a Post Office motorcycle coming down the street. Michelle gasped, blessed herself and bowed her head as the engine stuttered to a halt. I looked out the window and saw a spotty, red-haired teenager, his peaked cap askew and his face pinched with anxiety, squint at our door and then look at the plain white envelope in his hand. The telegram boy seemed to stare at that paper forever. But then the motor leapt into life again and the unlikely looking ‘angel of death’ pushed off. That day, the telegram was for somebody else. Michelle let out a sigh as deep as the earth, blessed herself again and left the room.

  I heard from Robert five days later. He was calling from Dover and would be on a train to Reading in an hour. They were to take some rest there before moving on to a base somewhere further north. I didn’t hesitate, to hell with the WAAF rules. I’d face the music later. Peterson was at lunch so I left a note on his desk, saying there was a family emergency and that I would try to be back in the morning. As I rushed down the corridor, I collided with Penrose. He put an arm around my waist to steady me and then hastily pulled it away. I didn’t notice at the time but later, I remembered the awkward gesture. Memories can also have their roots in the future, Diane.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I’m in such a hurry and… Robert is home. He got out of Dunkirk at last. I’m taking the next train to Reading but I’ve to go home and change and… I can’t miss the train. I don’t know how long he’ll be there. He could…”

  Penrose put a finger to my lips, the lightest of touches, a butterfly’s kiss.

  “Shush, it’s fine. Go. I’ll talk to Peterson and the others, square it all with them. Don’t worry,” he said. “Go.”

  One long look into his eyes and then I was on my way out the revolving door. As I turned, I caught a glimpse of him standing there, watching me. My lips still tingled from the barely-there pressure of his finger but it didn’t matter. We were all experts in denial by then.

  At home, after several frantic minutes of pulling clothes from the wardrobe, I decided to stay in my WAAF uniform. I slid my last pair of nylon stockings onto my legs and made up my face quickly but carefully – foundation, brown eyeshadow to complement my eyes and a bright red lipstick that Evelyn had sent me. I was so nervous it took me three attempts to get the lipstick right. Even as I primped, I scolded myself for focusing on such trivial things.

  “You know nothing. Nothing,” I told the flustered girl in the mirror even as I reworked my eyeliner with a shaking hand.

  I was terrified Robert would have outgrown me, that we would have fallen out of sync. How could he still love me after what he’d been through? In terms of experiences, we had already spent a lifetime apart. Charlotte had managed to draw my father back and keep him safe with her but I was not my mother. W
ould I be strong enough? If I didn’t measure up now, today, would that be it? We weren’t married. There was nothing to tie him to me if I wasn’t up to the task and I was so stupid and so inexperienced that I didn’t even know what that task might be.

  Robert was already seated in the teahouse when I got to Reading. I stopped for a moment in the doorway, paralysed by his solidity. He looked so real, so familiar. I raised my hands to my mouth and stifled a sob. I was so relieved. Here was the man I loved and half-feared I’d dreamed up. He was a little skinnier around the face maybe, but otherwise it was the Robert who’d been in my head all these months. I don’t know what I expected. Some kind of Dracula-esque dishevelment, I suppose. I should have known that the worst injuries are those you cannot see.

  A few seconds later, I was in his arms. We moved to a booth; neither of us wanted to let go.

  “How long do we have?” I asked.

  “I have to be back in the barracks by midnight and then we’ll be shipped off to a base next week but I’ll try to get leave to come and see you in London before we go anywhere else.”

  He pulled me closer, burying his face in my hair and breathing deeply.

  “You smell so wonderful, my darling Gertrude. Good God, I feel alive again. I don’t know if it’s the bath, the shave, the food or you but it’s like I’ve woken from a dreadfully long nightmare.”

  “It’d better be me, you scoundrel,” I said, laughing through my tears but wanting to cry even more at the sight of his crooked smile.

  “Of course, it’s you. Always you.”

  He paused, looking around at the bleak, bland room where puny light bulbs were fighting a losing battle against the blackout gloom. There were only three other occupied tables but from the look on Robert’s face, it could have been the Ritz.

  “I can’t quite believe it. It’s inconceivable that all this is still here.”