A Crimson Dawn (46 page)

Helen smiled sadly. ‘You don't have to. Just see this war out - for Rab's sake. That's all the payment I want.'

Emmie nodded, too overcome for words.

Helen added, ‘You mustn't come back - not till this is all over.'

The women hugged each other in regret.

As the war entered its fifth year, rationing was introduced to alleviate high prices and creeping starvation. Long-suffering Mabel caught pneumonia and, having not the strength to fight it, died all too suddenly. Laurie, housebound with a bad chest, was as bereft as Philip, and Emmie found herself in charge of the monthly trip to town to pick up supplies. She worried for the baby who stirred in her womb; though she was so thin it hardly showed under her coat. But it concerned her more to think of them running out of food, should snow come in February and cut them off.

She took Barny to help with old Cobbles and they struggled through the swollen river and over icy tracks. It took all day to go the few miles into Standale and back. But shopkeepers took pity on the chattering pale-faced boy and were generous with the measures of tea, lard and bacon. Emmie and Barny returned, frozen and worn out, to the communal fire that they kept going in the Runcies' cottage. Emmie clasped a copy of the
Herald
.

‘This'll cheer you - general strikes in Prague and Budapest,' she told the men eagerly. ‘The workers have had enough - they're striking for peace. Rumour is the famine on the Continent's much worse than here. And listen to this: martial law has been declared in Berlin after strikes by the socialist Spartacists.'

Emmie placed another log on the fire and poured Barny a cup of hot tea with numb, shaking hands. ‘Here you are, bonny lad. Barny was that helpful with Cobbles - right little coachman. You've taught him well, Philip.'

Philip smiled absent-mindedly.

‘And here's something to celebrate - House of Lords have passed the bill giving women over thirty the vote. Wouldn't Mabel have cheered?' Emmie said, eyes shining.

Philip looked up as if hearing her for the first time. ‘She would indeed,' he nodded, turning from her and blowing hard into his handkerchief.

Emmie was determined to keep their small commune going. Laurie was too frail to face another prison term and Philip's cheerful optimism had withered with his wife's death. Without her care, he would give up too. At Christmas, the elderly Mr Calvert had shut up The Grove and gone to London to stay with relations where he felt he could better lobby the Government. He had left them with a plentiful supply of wood and assured them they would have no trouble with the local authorities, but Emmie felt the more vulnerable without his protection.

So Emmie kept to herself her worries over Rab. The last she heard had been two months ago, a message through Mr Calvert that he was in prison in Liverpool. He was facing a harsh five-year sentence of hard labour. Emmie did not like to dwell on what that was doing to him physically, let alone to his mental state. She knew how much harder it must be for Rab to return to prison, knowing the deprivations he would face. She speculated as to why no letters came from him. Was he in solitary for refusing to do prison work, or was he anxious to keep attention away from The Grove and his comrade Laurie?

Emmie did not allow herself to entertain the thought that he might be ill or even dead. If that were the case, Helen would surely have got news to her. So she preferred no news to bad news, almost dreading that there might be a message for her under the milk churn on the track to The Grove.

As the spring came and her pregnancy approached full term, Emmie fretted over how she would manage. She had made enquiries about midwives in Standale and had the name of one who was prepared to travel up to The Grove if fetched in the trap. Yet she did not like the idea of strangers coming and prying around the encampment. They might gossip about the young man with the persistent cough, of whom there was no record.

Then, one day in early April, Barny came scampering into the cottage, holding up a dead rabbit.

‘Ned's back,' he cried. ‘His da gave me this. Come and see, Mam.'

Emmie toiled up the bank after him, breathless but overjoyed to see the spiral of smoke from the Kennedys' camp in the woods. Lily came out to greet her, noticing her pregnancy at once.

‘Emmie! When's it due? Is Rab pleased?' She saw the look of warning on Emmie's face. ‘Sit down and tell me everything,' her friend said, waving the boys away to play.

Two days later, Emmie went into labour as she was digging up beetroot. She sent Barny for Lily, who came at once.

‘I've delivered babies all over the place,' Lily reassured, boiling up water and helping Emmie into the cold, damp bed. ‘This is a palace compared to some.'

The labour was quick, and the baby small as it slithered into the world, but Emmie used up the last of her energy to bring it out. She lay, utterly exhausted, as the infant gave a querulous wail.

‘A bonny baby girl,' Lily cried, thrusting her into Emmie's arms. ‘What will you call her?'

Emmie gazed at the tiny, wizened creature with a shock of dark hair. ‘Mary,' she whispered, ‘after me mother. And Helen after Rab's.' She kissed her daughter's soft head.

‘Mary Helen,' Lily repeated, ‘that's a grand name for the wee lassie.'

She bundled the baby up in a warm blanket and left them both to sleep. Emmie closed her eyes, thankful her labour was safely over. Somehow she must get word to Rab about his new daughter. She knew that whatever state he was in, the news would give him the determination to carry on.

***

Rab had to be helped from the punishment cell. Light stabbed his eyes. He could not speak, his throat raw from the tube they had forced down it days ago. A year in prison and he was to be allowed to speak on exercise for forty minutes a day. Except he was now too weak for exercise and no longer had the power of speech. The warders dragged him back to his cell and locked him in.

He tried to remember the turning point, the moment he had broken. For months he had held out, refusing to stitch mailbags, going on hunger strike to protest at the treatment of prisoners. It was no longer just the COs who concerned him, but the others, brutalised and degraded by prison conditions. They were locked up like animals in cages, sent mad by staring at blank walls for endless hours, months, years. He saw it corrupting the young warders, hardening them. He saw how ill the prison chaplain became after a death sentence was carried out.

Rab's mind was blank of much that had happened this past year, but he remembered the execution. He had passed the condemned man in the corridor, chained to a warder. Rab did not know his crime. Their eyes had met and they had nodded. Rab was haunted by the thought he was one of the last people the man had seen, yet he had been allowed to say nothing.

The three days the prisoner had been on his landing, the inmates had been restless and the warders short-tempered. On the man's last night, they heard him screaming out for the doctor or the governor to release him. Rab buried his head under his blanket, trying to block out the howling, but could not. He had flashes of panic as he remembered his own time in a condemned cell in France, as the dawn came up on what he thought was his last day. The fear was indescribable; it tore at his guts.

He wanted to rush and bang on his cell door to demand the man's release, but knew it would end in a flogging or solitary. Rab had gritted his teeth and clamped his hands together to stop himself acting. The chaplain had been called and eventually calmed the man down.

The next morning, no one had been allowed out of their cells as the prisoner was led out to the gallows. Rab heard the door being unlocked, the sound of footsteps ringing along the landing, the hushed silence. No noise was made until, shortly afterwards, the tolling of the prison bell announced that the man was hanged. Someone at the end of the corridor began to cry.

At chapel the following Sunday, the chaplain had been absent. He reappeared a week later, looking gaunt and ill, and gave them a sermon about Jesus promising Heaven to the murderer on the cross. Two weeks later, he had been replaced. Rab had gone on hunger strike.

But it was not the execution that had been the final straw. It was a dandelion. All summer he had thought of Emmie, knowing that their baby would have been born. But he had heard nothing. Was it a girl or a boy? Had something gone wrong? Had the baby died? Had Emmie died? Perhaps Tom had been invalided out of the army and she had gone back to him. Endlessly, he tortured himself with such thoughts. The only letter he had received recently was from his mother, but that was before his latest spell in solitary and it had told him nothing of Emmie or Barny.

Rab's barrel-ceilinged punishment cell was mostly below ground level, but the top of his narrow window gave a glimpse of the floor of the exercise yard. Every day he feasted his eyes on the tramping feet of the prisoners and tried to make out their conversation. One day, he had noticed a green stalk of a dandelion growing out of a crack beside his window. Its vivid colour made his eyes water to see such beauty spring from the drab uniform grey.

Each day, he pulled himself up so that he could gaze on the green blade and watch in expectation as the tight head began to flower. He thirsted for the bright yellow head to shine into his cell like the sun. But before that could happen, a gardening party came round the yard and pulled the weed up by its roots.

Rab sank on to his cell floor and wept. He wept at the destruction of beauty and because he knew that the summer was over and it would not grow again. Somewhere out in the world were Emmie, Barny and their baby, a symbol of beauty clinging on to life. Now he had to face yet another winter without them and did not know how he would get through it. The dandelion was too fragile to survive; perhaps they all were.

Yet as he wept and railed at the injustice, Rab knew above anything else that he wanted to survive. He wanted to live to see Emmie again, to see green fields and dandelions, to fish with Barny, to hold his baby. Desire for life surged through his broken body, even as it collapsed under the strain of malnutrition and incarceration.

He gave up his hunger strike and submitted to prison regulations. After a further week in solitary, he was back on the old landing. Fellow COs banged their cell doors to welcome him back, some shouting out to him in defiance of the warders. Yet Rab hung his head in shame, knowing he had reached the end of his endurance.

The weeks that followed were full of rumours about the war ending. Central Europe was collapsing in disarray, German sailors were mutinying, Bavaria was in revolt. The other inmates discussed the news every day as they tramped around the yard in the autumn rain, but Rab did not join in. He felt detached from it all, as if they discussed another world to which he no longer belonged. He hardly noticed the sleet down the back of his neck or remembered the names of those who stamped past him in an attempt to keep warm. He did not have the energy to keep up and they had grown used to him not speaking.

One November day, a fellow CO clapped him on the back.

‘They're going to sign,' he grinned. ‘Bloody war's nearly over. Sooner or later, they'll have to let us go.'

Rab looked at him, nonplussed. He struggled to speak. ‘Sign w-what?' he whispered.

‘The Armistice, matey,' his companion cried.

The next day, as Rab sat in his cell, conjuring pictures out of the familiar cracks in the whitewash, there was a sudden blare of hooters beyond the prison walls. He jumped, startled at the noise. From the cells around him, prisoners began to bang on their tin plates, shouting and hollering. Over the din came the peal of the chapel bell.

For a stunned moment, Rab thought it was the beginnings of a prison riot. Then he remembered what the man in the yard had told him. This must be the end of the war. He tried to get to his feet, but his knees would not hold him. It was the moment for which he had waited so long, battled so hard. Now it was here, he felt numb and empty. What had it all been for? Sam and his father were dead. Gentle Peter was a soldier, his widowed mother eked out a pittance in a village that no longer respected her. He was a pathetic, broken man, no use to anyone.

Rab reached under his blanket and pulled out the shard of slate he kept hidden. He had picked it up once in the yard. Over the weeks he had sharpened it on his cell wall. He pressed it to his wrist in despair. Rab pierced his shrunken skin with the slate and watched in detachment as a bead of blood oozed out. It had all been quite pointless. For all their bravery and sacrifice, they had not been able to stop the war. For over four years it had reaped its bloody harvest until the strongest aggressor had won. How long before the next? How long before Barny and his generation were being conscripted?

The sudden image of Barny's grinning, trusting face came unbidden into his mind, as vivid as if he had seen the boy yesterday. Rab felt winded. Barny, the lad he had loved as fiercely as if he had been his own.

And Emmie. What had happened to his beloved Emmie? Rab's heart squeezed. She had been exiled from her home, cast out by her husband and family, criminalised by the war. But had she survived? Did she wait for him? All at once, he realised he had to know.

Rab dropped the slate, a sob rising deep inside. It shook him to his core.

As the cacophony of celebration carried on along the landing, no one heard the racking sobs of the silent, brooding man who had once been known as Radical Rab.

Emmie and her friends at The Grove lived in a strange limbo. The war was over, but the hardship and rationing appeared worse than ever. Emmie waited tensely for word of Tom's return or Rab's release. Surely the authorities would not make him complete his five-year sentence now that everything had changed? The thought was unbearable. Helen had written once since the end of the war; she did not expect Peter home till the spring and had heard nothing of Rab. Philip was attempting to find out Rab's whereabouts through Mr Calvert, who remained in London. She had lost touch with Flora and wondered if their letters had been intercepted.