Gifts of War (5 page)

By this time—the time of Izzy’s second visit—I had been told by the medical authorities at Sedgeberrow that I would probably always walk with a slight limp. Although the reconstruction of my pelvis had gone well, small bits of bone were missing—shot away; the connection with my left leg was less than perfect, so that, in one way and another,
my whole hip area was a good deal less than 100 percent. That wasn’t quite as depressing as the news about my prostate, but it wasn’t wholly unexpected either. When I reported my medical progress to my commanding officer at Tetbury, he too said he wasn’t surprised. “But don’t worry, Montgomery,” he went on. “We can’t let you and your German go to waste. I’ll inform the War Ministry—I’m sure they’ll need you somewhere in intelligence. Stand by.”

So I might get a job that my father approved of after all.

The upshot was that in mid-June the Sedgeberrow medics said I was free to leave their care but would not be suitable for “active duty”—whatever that meant—for two to three months. I told the CO. and then went home, to Edgewater. But I felt uneasy, back in my old room, with its books and fishing tackle, and cricket bits and pieces. There was a war on, after all. So after three days I wrote off for some German-language books, to make sure I didn’t get rusty. The bookseller in London who sent back the books included with it a flyer from the War Ministry that he said he had been instructed to give to all people who bought German-language material from him. It was aimed primarily at women, not at men, and it asked anyone who thought they were proficient in German—“proficient” was the word used, I remember—to consider working for the war effort. It said that if candidates passed a language test, tuition would be provided free of charge, with free board and lodging, in specialist subjects— technology, economics, geography—and it listed several places where these courses were given: Carlisle, Doncaster, Nottingham—and Stratford-upon-Avon. I couldn’t believe it until I realized that the school where the tuition was given was probably the self-same language center where Wilhelm Wetzlar had worked before the war. It made sense.

Stratford was the closest anyway, so I applied there, via my commanding officer, and was duly summoned for a test. I borrowed my
father’s motorcar and, more to the point, his petrol allowance and, in early July 1915, I set out one Sunday for the forty-five-mile drive from Edgewater to Stratford. I put up at a hotel and, at nine-thirty the next morning, presented myself at the school. The test was entirely oral and in my case lasted for all of twelve minutes, as it should have done. My German was near fluent and it was quickly apparent to the examiners that I was supremely qualified for their course. They said I could start the following Monday, and I accepted.

I was killing two birds with one stone on this trip and had driven up from Edgewater relatively slowly so as to conserve petrol for the next part of my journey—a side excursion to Middle Hill, the village where Sam Ross taught. Outside the exam room it was a beautiful day and I opened all the windows in the car as I found the Alveston and Wellesbourne Road, which led east, away from Stratford and toward Middle Hill. The road ran alongside the Avon River for a bit, then through a deer park and part of a sewage works. I passed a construction site, where there was digging and scaffolding. There were hills ahead of me but the road veered off to the left, north. I found Middle Hill easily enough—it was a collection of attractive, red-brick cottages, with a main street that widened at one point, sufficient (as I later found out) to accommodate a market there every Tuesday, at least in peacetime. As you came into the village, the road rose, to form a bridge over a canal and a railway line.

The school wasn’t difficult to find either. It was at the far end of the main road, but once I had found it I turned the car round and parked near the village pub, called the Lamb. A small change of plan was beginning to revolve around in my brain. I walked back in the direction of the school. My limp was quite pronounced (and moderately painful) in those days and, since I was in uniform, I attracted appreciative glances from the various people I passed who drew the conclusion that I had been wounded at the Front.

The school was next to the church and built to a much bigger scale than the other village buildings. It had been erected in a more forceful, assertive, bulky style, with stone gables and runnels and architraves. In case there should be any doubt about its purpose, one word was carved in capitals above the main entrance: SCHOOL.

I walked past and went on into the churchyard. A stream skirted the edge, the gravestones reaching all the way down to the sloping bank, where moorhens patrolled in a line. Beyond the stream there was an iron fence with a kissing gate and beyond that what looked like a cricket field. Here it was difficult to believe that we were at war, so peaceful and pastoral was the panorama, so far from Flanders in every way. A woman tidying the graves looked up as my shoes scuffed the gravel. She took in my uniform and smiled, though she didn’t say anything. Neither did the vicar, who appeared just then in a black cassock, scurrying like a large moorhen himself out of the church porch. His expression seemed abstracted and I hoped he wasn’t the figure of fun and gossip that our vicar back in Edgewater was. He was surprised to see me, I think, and a brief smile unraveled along his lips. But then he scurried on to the woman tidying the graves and engaged her in conversation.

I entered the church. It was small. A large brass cross glistened on the white cloth of the altar. Two bunches of flowers stood on either side of the cross. As I looked around, I could see that there were flowers everywhere, on the pulpit, next to the organ, and the table where the hymn books were stored—this was a much-loved, much-used place. Two rows of pews at the front of the nave were closed off by small wooden doors: private pews, no doubt belonging to the more important personages or families in the area. I hated that sort of thing—my own family had its pew in our village—but I had never done anything about it.

I sat farther back and thought for a bit. I can’t say that I had been
very religious before the war but, by now, after I had seen what I had seen, whatever residue of faith I might have had had been shot to pieces, like my pelvis. At the same time, the Christmas truce had shown me the power of Christianity to influence some men to behave well. Those with faith behaved better at Christmas, but how could I have faith?

But it wasn’t faith that concerned me most that morning. I took out the photograph of Wilhelm. I smiled, recalling Izzy’s misunderstanding and her earnest questioning. It was, I supposed, an easy mistake to make.

Sitting in the pew, I also took out my handkerchief and polished the toe caps of my shoes where they had scuffed the gravel outside. This was another mannerism inherited from my father that I couldn’t shake. He was obsessive about the shininess of his footwear.

The vicar came back in, wished me a polite “Good afternoon” as he went by, and began taking the hymn numbers from yesterday’s service from out of their holder.

With a start, I realized that it must have gone noon. I confirmed it with a glance at my pocket watch. Turning over in my mind the thought that was forming, I got up and went out into the sunshine.

As I approached the school I could see a small knot of mothers gathered by the gate. In the country, unlike the city, many children went home for lunch.

And then, across the playground, I saw her. Sally Ann Margaret Ross. There was no mistake. The same blond hair, the familiar Alice band, the same eyebrows and cheekbones. She was stooping and, from the expression on her face and the stern cast of her mouth, she was ticking off a young child, who had clearly done something wrong, but not very wrong. Maybe Sam Ross wanted the child’s mother to see the infant being rebuked, so the punishment would be reinforced at home. At any rate, the lecture didn’t last long, for she stood up and shooed
the child across the playground, toward its mother. She put a whistle in her mouth and her gaze raked the playground for any other infringement. Apparently, Sam Ross—at least on playground duty— was a strict teacher.

All this flashed through my mind—I remember now—but it was soon gone. For the fact is that my head was awash in other thoughts, thoughts I had had the night before, again in the car on the way to Middle Hill, and again in the church. Sam Ross was taller than I had imagined and she also had a figure that Wilhelm’s photo—a portrait only—had not even hinted at. But most of all there had been her manner, when stooping, admonishing the child. It was an amalgam of firmness and tenderness, tempered and graceful—here was a young woman of considerable presence. Her movements matched her beauty. I could easily understand what Wilhelm had seen in her.

For all these reasons and, I told myself, because she was so obviously on “playground duty,” I didn’t approach her there and then. Instead, I walked on and reached the Lamb. It had opened at noon. There weren’t many in the pub and they all fell silent when I entered. It was an appreciative silence, though, not hostile. In fact, after I had ordered a pint of bitter, the barman told me that the first drink was on the house and this, I later discovered, was not unusual for war veterans. (He actually said, “The Kaiser’s paying,” and grinned.) I thanked him, raised my glass to the others, and then retreated to a table in an alcove to consider what I was going to do. I took out Wilhelm’s photo one more time, and then put it away again.

While I was sipping my bitter two things happened that affected my plan. First, I gathered from the general conversation in the bar that a couple of people were billeted in the pub, helping to build an airfield near Wellesbourne, the construction site I had seen on my way there. Then an older man came in. The barman poured him a pint and
took from behind the bar a plate with a chunk of bread and some cheese on it. The older man accepted all this and sat near me, reading that day’s newspaper. He nodded to me affably and bit into his cheese.

Later, when the cheese and bread were finished, the barman came across to take away the empty plate.

“When’s the hearing?” the barman said.

“A month from now,” replied the older man.

“And who comprises the jury?”

“The board, you mean? It’s not a jury, strictly speaking. It comprises me, as headmaster, one of the teachers, elected by the staff, two school governors, and a school inspector from Coventry—five in all.”

“And what are her chances?”

At this, the older man drew a finger across his throat.

The barman disappeared and the headmaster went back to his paper.

Later, I asked the barman for a sandwich but he didn’t have any. The headmaster, he said, had a special arrangement. So I ordered a half pint of bitter and sat on, thinking, long after the headmaster had gone back to school for the afternoon lessons.

Eventually, an hour or so later, I drove back to my parents’ house. I didn’t wait for school to finish, as had been my original intention, and I didn’t approach Sam Ross with Wilhelm’s photograph.

When I got back to Edgewater, the first thing I did was to buy a secondhand motorcycle going cheaply in the village garage and which my father paid to have renovated (fortunately, the kick-start was on the right side, the side of my good leg). Then, a couple of days later—in what I thought was my niftiest move—I said good-bye to my parents, rode the bike to Middle Hill, and rented a room in the Lamb. They
seemed happy to have me, the food could have been worse, there was a garage for my bike, and I could run up a tab at the bar. My course at Stratford was forty minutes away.

It took only a day or so to put my half-formed plan into operation. One evening, when he came in for a late-night whisky, I engaged the headmaster in conversation. He was avid for news, as everyone was, as to what the Front was actually like. He came into the pub most nights and, in less than a week, he had done what I hoped he would do—he invited me to give a short talk at the school, about life at the Front. I said I would be delighted.

And so, the following week the whole school was collected together in the gymnasium, which doubled up when needed as a school hall. The children sat cross-legged on the floor, the staff sat on the stage at one end, and a few parents turned up and stood around the walls. I shook hands with all the staff beforehand, so I was introduced to Sam.

The headmaster had asked me not to frighten the children with too much gore and reality, and so I did not dwell on the atrocities I had seen, the bodies blown to smithereens, the unrecognizable lumps of flesh and hair caught up on the barbed wire, the pitiful screams of grown men beyond the pale and beyond rescue in the shapeless darkness of no-man’s-land. I did mention the devastation—I didn’t think I could avoid it altogether—but with luck, I thought, the war would be over well before the young children in that gymnasium were old enough to fight.

They were young children who couldn’t sit still for very long, and would most likely need to go to the lavatory at any moment. So I talked mostly about the Christmas truce, which was popular with the headmaster and the staff. The children were surprisingly upset about the capture of the rabbits; I think that from where they were sitting, they would have preferred it for the men to have gone hungry than for
two rabbits to be killed and
eaten
. Everyone knew “Silent Night,” of course, and could
relate
to that. I mentioned my meeting with a German officer, and our exchange of gifts—everyone thought the plum-pudding business was very funny—but, and here’s the thing, I didn’t mention Wilhelm by name or the business with the photograph. And I carefully avoided looking in Sam Ross’s direction during that part of my talk. Instead, I moved quickly on to our agreement about the burial of the dead—a suitably uplifting theme for a school environment.

And then it was over. The children gave me three cheers and scampered off. The headmaster invited me and some of the staff back to his office for a sherry, and there I made a point of talking to Sam. I asked her if she lived in the village; she said that she did but she didn’t volunteer where. I asked her if she was married; she blushed and shook her head. I said I was staying at the Lamb, that that was where I had met the headmaster, and asked her if she ever went there. Again she shook her head. I asked her what the highlights of Stratford were but she said that, apart from Shakespeare’s house, she wasn’t sure if there were any.