Apple Blossom Time (26 page)

We ran until we couldn’t run any more. Then we stood under a tree, leaning against it for support, sucking in the soft, sweet summer air. Far away, farther than the muzzle flash would carry, the sound of guns made the night tremble.

‘All right?’ asked Grace at last.

I nodded.

‘It wouldn’t do your shiny, bright new stripes any good to be rounded up by the MPs, now would it?’

‘You really are wonderful, Grace. You think of everything.’

‘I know! Now – straighten your tie and pull your hat down a bit. Perfect. We can stroll into camp as innocent as though we’ve just come from confession.’

We linked arms and strode off, singing.

‘Ven der Fuehrer says “Ve iss der Master Race”,

ve Heil! Heil! right in der Fuehrer’s face.

Not to luff der Fuehrer iss a great disgrace,

So ve Heil! Heil! right in der Fuehrer’s FACE!’

Dear Mother

We’ve had a bit of a mauling, as you will have heard, while trying to break through to the Belgian coast, so I write to reassure you that I am quite well. You must have read all about it in the newspapers at home and probably know more about events than I do. At least that means that the censor will leave this letter undecorated by his blue pencil.

Dear God, this is a horrible place. A slough, a stinking morass, the bottom of the pit. Every natural feature has been blasted away. The only reference points are shattered stumps, like rotten teeth, or upturned wagons or bloated corpses. At home, we direct travellers by pub signs. Over here, we have different landmarks. Turn right by the Legless Machine Gunner. Straight on to the Forgotten Fusilier. Then left at the Dead Donkey. A merciful God will never send to hell the men who fought their way to Passchendaele. We have been there already.

The lads suffer terribly from mud and cold. They all have chilblains and raw feet. They sleep in shelves dug into the rear of the trench, like a human dovecot. I am wet and miserable, but they are ten times more so and we are all desperately short of sleep. We came up from reserve just in time for the last big push. The battalion we were supposed to relieve passed us going down the line at the same time, so there was no proper handover. They left us with one guide. I don’t blame them. What did they have to tell us? We had reached the end of the world.

We were all wet and bad-tempered by the time we arrived in position. I don’t know how it is, but duckboards seem to have a malevolent sense of humour. We were tipped off them into foul water every few yards. At one point we passed through an appalling stench. Word came back that an entire mule team had sunk into the mud there about ten days before. They called it Dead Mule Alley. A cartload of chloride of lime wouldn’t take the stink away. Every few moments, a soldier would become wedged by his pack at a corner and have to be shoved from behind to free him. I’m sure the guide sent down his warnings about wire, but like Chinese whispers, by the time they reached my platoon at the end of the line, they bore no relation to where the wire actually was. I would duck where there was nothing and a few minutes later be practically garroted. It was a tedious night and we were all exhausted by the time we’d covered the five miles.

The trench is a wretched one, shallow and wet, with firesteps cut too narrow to stand on and the parapets blown to smithereens, but since we were not here to defend, but meant to attack and take the slope in front of us, it didn’t seem to matter too much. Now we’re back where we started, only there are not so many of us as there were when we arrived.

Did you ever go into the kitchen at home, Mother? I don’t suppose you did. Mrs Ruggles always came to you for her orders. I remember her, standing at your little desk at the window of the morning room, where it catches the sun. She carries a fat notebook and pencil and has her sleeves rolled down for once, covering her red arms. You’re turning over recipes and frowning and biting your lip. You know that whatever you order, Father will grumble. She has a machine, you know, that she fixes on to the edge of the kitchen table with a big butterfly screw. Into one end she feeds recognizable pieces of meat and out of the other end comes pulp. I can see her standing there, turning the handle, making the remains of the Sunday beef into Monday rissoles. ‘Now then, you, Master Edwin,’ she’d say, ‘you keep your fingers out of that there, you’ll lose them, else.’ And I’d make her show me the finger that had lost its tip. It has a blunt end, stitched like a star. Did you know we had eaten a bit of Mrs Ruggles? The staff feeds the battalion into one end of their machine and we come out as rissoles, but not so neatly shaped.

And so here we are, still facing that wretched little slope that passes for a hill in this drowning land. We have been marched up to the top of the hill and marched down again. And there are precious few of us left. I know the others are out there somewhere. They are lying at the bottom of crump holes, their mouths and nostrils packed with mud. They are the human rags that hang on wire like washing on a line. They are turned to spray that spatters our faces and our clothes. We inhale them. We paddle in them.

Oh, Mother, don’t read this. Why should you know what I know? I’m being selfish to write it. Or maybe the paper will be so scrawled on by the censor that there will be nothing left for you to read.

I was put in charge of a mopping-up party the other day. When a trench has been taken, then any remaining pockets of resistance must be ‘mopped up’. What a cosy, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, Sunday lunch after matins sort of phrase that is. You take half a dozen men and stand outside a dugout and throw a few smoke bombs down, so that the poor blighters inside must suffocate or run out. You station your men outside the entrance and wait for the enemy to appear. They come out, coughing and streaming with tears, hands in the air or rubbing their eyes. But you only have half a dozen men, not enough to spare to escort prisoners behind the line, so you bayonet them. A neat solution. Suppose that had been suggested before the war? What an outcry there would have been, what accusations of Hunnish practices and Prussian frightfulness. Yet here we are, the British army, refusing to take prisoners. The only way to win this war is by being more frightful than the other side. The idea frightens me.

The CO tells me I am to have a medal, but I’m not sure what for. I must have done something to please him at some time. Heaven knows what. Bravery is simply a matter of survival. You and your friends live, or the other chap and his friends. Them or us. That’s all there is to it, really.

Tom is in hospital. He was buried under a collapsing dugout. It wasn’t hit by a shell, it just fell apart in a muddy landslide and Tom and Sergeant Clapton were underneath it. We dug as fast as we could, scrabbling with our hands, afraid to use spades in case we should hit their faces. It was like clearing away black porridge. Sergeant Clapton was dead. Tom began to breathe again when we cleared the mud from his nose and mouth, but he was very confused and couldn’t stop shaking, so was sent down the line for a few days. I miss him, but I hope he doesn’t come back too soon.

Do you think you could be especially nice to Diana? I know you are not very keen on her, but she can’t be held responsible for her parents and she really is a very sweet girl. We have quite a jolly correspondence going. She lost her cousin a week or so ago – I’m a bit vague about time at the moment – and she will be dreadfully cut up. They were very close. Cranford-Lewis. Do you remember him? We were in the same form and once you took him out to lunch after Sports Day. Well, he’s in a hole in Sanctuary Wood now. I don’t suppose there will be much point in having an Old Boys’ Reunion after all this is over. I may be home for a little while soon. My name was a long way down the leave roster, but now I see that it has crept up towards the top. No, that’s not right, my name hasn’t moved. The others have gone.

Edwin

P.S. I see that the censor will never pass this letter, so I am giving it to our CSM to post on his way home. He is a decent fellow and will make sure you get it. Someone has to know.

I lay in my canvas camp bed and listened to the rain splatter off the tent like pebbles thrown against it. We ATS sergeants lay in a circle with our feet to the central tent pole. Myra Compton was just going out on shift and Doris Aitken had just come off shift in the field telephone exchange. She was asleep already. I angled my shaded torch down further, so as not to disturb her.

A bit of a mauling at a place called Passchendaele. He was becoming more real. Here, in France, I heard what he was trying to say and understood. The sponged and pressed uniform still lay in mothballs in the trunk in the attic at Ansty House, but I had the man here, in my hands, in his own words. The serious boy was growing into a man with a wry sense of humour and a touching concern for his friend. Poor Tom. No wonder he screamed in the dark. I was beginning to understand my stepfather better, as well as my father.

*   *   *

I heard from Vee at last.
‘Here, were you pulling my leg, or what,’
she wrote,

sending me on a wild goose chase all the way to Wooburn and me in an interesting condition, too! I’ve turned into a real roly-poly with this baby, blown up like a flipping great barrage balloon overnight, and so when a nice young sailor stood up to offer me his seat in the train, I couldn’t fit into it and his mate had to stand up as well. Who says chivalry is dead?

Well, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I couldn’t find hide nor hair of your father in the Imperial War Graves Commission records. The clerk there, an old biddy with a moustache, had the cheek to ask me if I was certain that he really was dead – as if you wouldn’t know! They did their best, but everything’s at sixes and sevens, all the records are stuffed into fireproof trunks, just in case, but it makes it very hard to turn up anything useful. Don’t tell me, I know, I said to her, there’s a war on.

Of course, it doesn’t help that you don’t know his rank or his regiment or when he died or where. Not much to go on, is it? Funny old family you belong to, I must say. How can you just lose somebody? My Uncle Jimmy was killed at Wipers and we all know exactly where they’ve put him. It’s ever so nice there, lawns and flowerbeds and all. Aunt Dot went on a sort of pilgrimage and took a picture of his grave to put on the mantelpiece and keeps a pressed poppy from France in her bible.

So, armed with just a name and initials, this is what I found. There’s an Ansty in the Hampshire Regiment buried near Loos, but he died in 1915, so he can’t be your dad. There’s an Ansty buried at Tyne Cot, but he was an Australian. There’s an Anstey at Telegraph Hill, but he has an ‘e’, so that’s no good. There’s an E Ansty at St Julien, but he was a private and your dad can’t have been an OR because we saw his uniform. There’s an E G T Ansty at Château Thierry. One of the initials is wrong, but the dates fit. Could that be him, do you think? Probably not. He was a rather old major, much too old for your mother, unless she was looking for a father figure. I see your dad as young and handsome and glamorous, like Leslie Howard only darker, a real lost hero. I’m sorry if that sounds flippant. It’s not meant to. But it is all rather romantic, don’t you think?

Well, that’s it. Not much to go on. Thank heavens your name’s not Smith! Maybe you’ll never find your father, Laura. Does it really matter? I’m serious. Think about it. You’ve got a mother and a terrific stepfather and a lovely gran and a sister who isn’t half as bad as my sisters. What more do you want? Hankering after two fathers is a bit greedy.

I had a letter from my Carlton the other day. So at least I know he’s safe so far. He sounds as though he’s having a whale of a time, living it up among the mademoiselles. He’s supposed to be fighting a war not fighting off the ladies. I’d have his guts for garters if I ever thought he’d two-timed me. He sent me the cutest little pair of white satin shoes for the new baby, with tiny blue forget-me-nots – French, of course, you can always tell. I wonder where on earth he found them.

Lots of love,

Vee

P.S. Jennifer sends a big kiss. She’s growing into such a little madam and needs her dad to keep her in order. I know ‘it’ will be a boy this time because he’s kicking the hell out of me already. Would you like to be godmother to Carlton H. Riversdale III? Say yes.

P.P.S. For heaven’s sake, why don’t you just ask your mum? She must know everything. Or if you think it would upset her – but it is twenty-five years ago – why don’t you ask Tom or your gran? Seems to me you’re making an awfully big secret out of something when three people already have all the answers.

Did Vee think I hadn’t tried? Things weren’t that simple. All three had shut up as though they were under a holy vow of silence. It seemed as though just saying the words
my father
gave my whole family the jitters. They’d talk any old twaddle rather than answer me.

Not much to go on. Vee was right. But in another way she was wrong. It did matter. It seemed to matter more and more.

*   *   *

We followed the war and moved from one farmyard to another, scarcely distinguishable from the last. Same broken walls. Same gaping roof. Same scrawny cows and chickens barely worth killing. Same dour, tough, hardy women, making do, hanging on grimly for a peace that would be long in coming. They were used to us now. The first rapture of welcome had passed. No more flags and flowers and kisses. Bent over the scarred earth, repairing the ravages of liberation, they barely raised their heads as we passed.

And when we got to Caen, it wasn’t there any more. I had seen London and I had seen Southampton, but nothing had prepared me for this. The city of William the Conqueror had been all but removed from the map. The smell of destruction still lingered, thick as fog, of crumbled, ancient masonry, of fractured sewers and seeping gas and the sickly, vinegar-and-sugar smell of corpses decaying under the rubble.