Lily's Story (112 page)

In
desperation, as he prepared to sail for England and foreign
battlefields thousands of miles away, she began to tell about a few
of the simple follies that peppered the everyday life of the
village and upon which she had begun to cast an ironic eye. To her
surprise she found the effort much easier than she
t
hought it would be – closing
her eyes and recapitulating a scene or a conversation overheard and
pressing Eddie’s face as close to her own as she dare. “You
remember old Ollie Jensen who used to be reeve, and was always
suspected of treating his horses worse than his wife? Well, he
enters his prize pacer in the May Day races down at the track, and
when his driver shows up drunk, he decides to hop on the sulky
himself. But Bomber, his gelding, sees his chance to get even for
past whippings and indignities, and just as the horses come up to
the starting line, Bomber breaks, rears up and stops as still as a
stone right in front of the steward’s stand. Well, you can imagine
the cries of encouragement and helpful advice that started raining
down from the bleachers. Ollie himself goes puffy and red in the
face, like someone was pumping air into a tomato, and lashes the
gelding’s well-padded rump with his whip, which makes the creature
jump an inch straight up in the air but not a fingernail forward
towards the other pacers now disappearing around the first turn.
‘Try sweet-talking, Ollie,’ somebody shouts from the cheap seats,
and Ollie pops out of his seat like a plucked radish and stomps
towards Bomber’s front end to whack him with the butt of his whip.
But the victim, with better timing than he ever showed in a race,
steps smartly into his hobbles and sprints off towards his
companions. Ollie then breaks the whip over his knee and has to be
helped off the track by his wife to avoid being run down by the
approaching stampede. You never saw a happier horse in your life,
running as free as a bluebird alongside of the others without the
burdensome drone of a driver. He finished in a dead-heat with his
old rival.”

“
The fellows
want to hear more of your stories about the village. I assure them
you’re not making them up, but they’re not inclined to believe me.
Bart wants to know if Bomber had to share the purse with his
master?”

Granny found
herself in turn asking more and more about the fellows. “How did
Bart make out with the nurses at the camp dance? Was Henry too shy
to ask anyone?”
“Bart
naturally appropriated the prettiest girl among the two dozen
allotted to our battalion and danced with her the whole evening.
Unfortunately for the course of true romance, she was the worst
dancer, stomping on his feet so often he had to be carried to the
barracks and soaked up to his ankles in ice for three days. He
claims he purloined a kiss behind the packing cases. As you
surmised, Henry was too shy to ask for a dance, so Cliff did it for
him. I don’t think Henry had ever seen anything but a square dance
(
you
remember them, I reckon), but he adapted remarkably
well. I danced with a girl from London and one from Fredericton.
How odd to be holding, as closely and intimately as sweethearts,
two complete strangers from different parts of the continent coming
together in a Quebec bush-camp for the sole purpose, we hear, of
shooting to death a million Germans.”

“
You asked
about young Redmond, the third generation of his family to embrace
the grocery trade. Well, he did join up last week, and the talk
around town is that circumstances forced him to do so. It seems
that Grandma Quilty caught young Red with his thumb on the
meat-scales, and thinking she had her umbrella in her hand, she
started to whip him with it and call for the constable. It turns
out she was carrying a large bunch of beets just plucked out of the
vegetable hamper. She whapped him with seven or eight death-blows
so hard that the beet-juice bled all over his face and ran down his
white shirt, and he was laughing and yelling at the same time when
his mother comes scuttling out of the storeroom and sees him tipped
backwards on the butcher’s block covered in gore, and she thinks
he’s dead and faints into her husband’s arms. You can imagine the
variations of
that
tale going around for the third time!
The army will be a relief for young Red. By-the-by, did Sandy’s
father manage to get his corn in alone?”

“
We are to
complete our basic training here in Shorncliffe in the picturesque
county of Kent. What a relief after the stories being told about
First Division’s autumn and winter in the rains and muck of
Salisbury Plain. Here it is dry and warm, we are surrounded by
tropical green and curious, anachronistic villages with quaint
names like Dibgate, Otterpool and New Inn Green (very old). Our own
bell-tents are pitched on St. Martin’s Plain. Among the trees and
shrubbery on every side we can see church steeples shining in the
sun, and hear medieval bells tolling the hours. Ralph sprained his
ankle during a bayonet drill. He didn’t take kindly to suggestions
that he engage the services of his prominent daddy in a lawsuit
against the inventor of the Ross Rifle. By the way, Cliff has just
learned of the death of his grandfather, and is feeling very
remorseful about not going to see him before
embarkation: it seems Cliff is interested in the
history of the region and had promised that he would record the old
tales his grandfather often told about the pioneer days in New
Westminster. I told Cliff about Arthur, and it turns out that his
grandfather knew Arthur quite well. This was confirmed recently by
Cliff’s mother. Cliff would like to hear from you about any of
those great yarns Arthur used to tell us. He won’t believe my
versions, and I don’t blame him. Henry is terribly homesick. Any
advice?”

So it was that
Granny came to add or interpolate into her letters whole paragraphs
addressed directly to individual members of the Vic-platoon. “This
is for Henry only” she would print in caps, teasingly, for she knew
they sat around and read her letter together and likewise began to
pen postscripts of increasing length to Eddie’s own accounts. She
found herself spending entire days in composing responses, part of
the time spent in reflection on past events in reference to the
questions and requests raised for her. Cliff could not get enough
detail about Arthur’s days in the theatre of the 1860’s, and she
found herself rummaging through Arthur’s trunk, sometimes parting
with a cherished playbill – the names receding but still legible –
for the boy’s sake, though she was quite certain nothing would ever
fully assuage the
sense of
regret he was suffering so far away. Minor detail elicited from
Cliff’s mother would be duly relayed back to Granny and in some
cases half-told stories from each side were dove-tailed to make a
complete one, so that Arthur himself, through the eyes of the
deceased Mr. Strangways, was enabled to speak to her with fresh and
vicarious verve. When Sandy Lecker casually asked about farming
techniques in the pioneer days, she found herself talking about
events and impression she had not even dreamt about in more than
twenty years. Sandy was a farm-boy and he was willing to brave the
gentle derision of the others.

“
Ralph and I
took our furlough and went by train over to Salisbury and thence by
car towards Stonehenge. The cathedral is as magnificent as the
pictures we’ve seen of it, but no picture can replicate the awe we
felt standing in the nave and looking heavenward, and feeling the
incredible stillness created by the thousands of vaulting line so
cunningly crafted they appear as natural as rivulets in the stone
walls of a vast cavern. Next day we stood together on the English
grass more than two thousand years old and stared without
comprehension of any kind at the primitive, Druidic tablets aimed
with imperfect magnificence at the stars. It was only when we
passed by the old barracks and drilling ground on the road north
that we came to realize we were preparing for war. The charred mud
and filth of the rotting barracks looked to us very much like the
trenches in Belgium we’ve been hearing about since the day of our
arrival. Nevertheless, the peacefulness out here in the English
countryside is real, and is as deep as the stones of Tintern Abbey,
where we hope to go if we’re not sent across the
Channel.”

But they were on their
way to France on the seventeenth of September and thereafter not a
single reference was ever made to that pastoral quietude. In his
last letter before leaving Shorncliffe, Ralph typically made light
of the impending event: “We went on manoeuvres yesterday for the
sole purpose of proving that Sir Sam Hughes’ secretary was right
after all, that the ‘MacAdam shovel’ which bears her name (and a
number of unofficial ones provided free of charge) will not only
defy German bullets but dig a six-foot trench with the aid of the
human hand. Sir Sam steadfastly refuses to believe reports, spread
by the envious Brits, that the shield won’t stop a B-B at thirty
yards and, lacking a handle, the spade is useless as a delving
device. Bart suggests the whole thing is a Canadian plot to have
the Kaiser’s army laugh itself to death.”

Several of the boys now wrote
to her separately as well as collectively in the packet-sized
letters that left the postmistress puzzled and not-a-little
suspicious. Granny in turn continued to compose equally impressive
omnibus editions in addition to the smaller, private confidences to
‘her boys’.

“
There are no
words to describe the battleground,” Eddie wrote. “Nothing could
have been done to prepare us for it. Our training over here was cut
short when we were sent directly to the front as part of the newly
organized Canadian Corps (chalk up one for the colonies!). They
tell us we’re in Flanders near the Belgian village of Vierstraat,
south of Ypes. Some of the ground we occupy has changed hands
several times already and the devastation here is complete. I
expected to see battered houses and charred barns and rotting
orchards, but there are no such human signposts anywhere. Between
our trenches and the German’s a few hundred yards away, and behind
us for over a mile, there is not one distinguishing landmark; the
outbuildings have been flattened, pulverized by repeated shelling
and then tramped upon by marching feet so thoroughly into the mud
there is not the slightest hint of a farm ever having been.
Occasionally you step on something firm underfoot, and if it isn’t
a corpse, it’s likely to be the submerged stump of a tree, blasted
and then buried, with its roots still gripping something grim that
lurks below us everywhere. As we approach our front-line position
or as we’re returning to billets for our stint in reserve, we can
see the shattered orchards or half-burned rooves of hay barns,
enough to remind us of what we must have ruined.
A
s I peer ahead of me over the sandbag parapet, searching
for prey with my sniper’s eye, I cannot see any sign of where the
ground itself was – the ruts, craters, stinkponds, the gouged and
shredded turf are an alien landscape, bearing no resemblance to any
of those earthly contours we have inherited and cherished for
centuries. It is moon-ground, the erg-desert of my nightmares.
Sorry to be so depressing, but I do need someone to unburden this
on; among the fellows I have to be careful about each word, each
gesture, each well-intended jibe: the feelings we have for one
another are as fragile as they are deep; that is one thing I am
learning about the war, even before we’ve gone into
battle.”

“
Tell me your
feelings, Eddie, all of them. Let me know how the boys are
really
doing, I can’t trust the stories they invent to make me
feel less anxious. Let me know what they need to hear.”

“
Some of the
Canadians were involved a few days ago in the fighting around Loos,
part of a larger offensive at Artois and Champagne – a fiasco, we
suspect, from the endless lines of walking wounded filing past us
with their faces gray as paste, the whites of their eyes the
brightest colour visible against the backdrop of mud, the wan
uniforms, the darkening bandages, the dirt-streaked faces – they
remind me of blackface minstrels minus the smiles, music and
hypocrisy. While rumours fly of our imminent involvement, Ralph and
I go off on ‘borrowed’ bicycles all the way up to Ypes. It’s a
six-hundred-year-old country town, walled and sedate, its ornate
churches and stately guild-hall a
distillation of human civility. Ralph and I stood a few
feet apart and stared at the partial ruins of the latter building,
thinking of the handiwork and masonry and dogged imagination it
took to create it hundreds of years ago in spite of the clerical
armies of Europe who rolled back and forth across this very
territory in their petty attempts at ravaging it. ‘I wish we had
gone AWOL and up to London to see the Abbey’, I said to Ralph. He
didn’t say anything to me because by that time we were both weeping
silently. When we got back, though, we were delighted to find that
Henry’s wound was only superficial, and he was returned to us in
swaddling clothes. Please tell Sandy and Henry as much as you can
about the old days on the farm: it’s the only subject left which
they can still argue about. Write soon.”

“
They always
used axes to cut down the big trees because usually only one man
started the process, or the bush was too thick to wield a two-man
saw, or you couldn’t control the drop-spot as easily. Then the
hundreds of small branches had to be trimmed quickly with an expert
axe-hand so that only the trunk remained. You must remember that in
Lambton County we are talking about pines and plane trees and
walnut that soared a hundred and fifty feet in the air and often
ran six or eight feet across at the bole. It took a trained ox-team
to move these trunks and get them into a pile where they could be
burned. Only the best-looking limbs were sawn up for cordwood.
Everything else was burned into powdery ash.”