Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) (42 page)

The sun was streaming through the broken roof of the old barn, lighting up the interior with bright, dusty shafts. Numerous missing planks from the side of the building revealed small drifts of old straw inside and a rickety wooden ladder leading up to a dangerously broken down mezzanine. There appeared to be no evidence of recent occupation but Edward urged caution as he waved the men forward. The distant rumble of the artillery bombardment marked an odd contrast to the rigid stillness that embraced this flat plain as they crept under the cover of the hedge.

They were within twenty yards of the building when a devastating torrent of machine gun bullets ripped into them from behind an upturned farm cart standing in overgrown innocence in the field on the right. Three men fell instantly and the rest dived to find whatever cover was possible.

‘Bastards, stinking Boche bastards,’ Edward heard Liam shouting vehemently behind him. The cart was around forty yards away and the men were firing at it more out of frustration than conviction. The ground in front of the cart sloped gradually upwards towards it and offered no cover at all.

Liam began to crawl up a very shallow ditch that curved off up to the right and Edward yelled after him. ‘This one’s for Big Charlie,’ Liam shouted back.

After setting up the Lewis Gun team, Edward started to follow round the ditch after his pal. As he came within sight of him, Liam suddenly rose to his feet, pulled the pin on a grenade and flung it at the cart in one movement before dropping back down in the ditch. The cart rocked dramatically as the grenade exploded before falling slowly forward exposing the machine gun emplacement. Edward could see bodies of some of the German gunners on the ground but others were shouting and gesticulating wildly. Liam turned to Edward, who was yelling at his friend to come back. He grinned and stuck his thumb into the air. Then he was on his feet again and pulled the pin on another grenade.

The bullet hit Liam in the side of his forehead before he completed his throw and, as he fell, the grenade flew from his hand and landed some distance down the ditch. The explosion in the soft mud was muffled and Edward was on his feet and running towards Liam when he heard a great gasping sigh from where the grenade had landed. As he bent down to inspect his friend’s wound, he saw the faint green gas escaping from the deep mud where it had been trapped since some previous action. Blood was pouring down Liam’s deathly white face but he was still breathing. Edward knew that he must get him away from the gas before he could give any first aid.

He heaved on Liam’s shoulders, praying for the strength to get him to safety, hoping that his men would deal with the German soldiers, wishing that the gentle breeze, rolling the bank of green gas towards him, would change its direction. It was bad enough losing Big Charlie but not Liam as well. His feet slipped in the cloying mud as he dragged the limp body, bullets flew around him and he searched the depths of his being for the strength to get him back. ‘Come on, you awkward little sod,’ he groaned as Liam’s foot became entangled in roots growing through the side of the ditch.

Sucking in air to support his desperate struggle, he felt the familiar burning sensation in his throat. His eyes began to smart as he forced more steps from his aching legs. Within seconds, his eyes were flames and his throat rattled, his head began to reel and images from his past floated up in front of him like a picture show. Machine gun bullets splintered a branch of a tree close to his head, his lungs were on fire and his throat seemed to be filled with burning coals. With sweat pouring off him, he forced his legs to complete the vital steps to get Liam to safety. He could no longer see and his mind had become a swirling mist of dreams when he heard the soldiers’ voices. The words were telling him to release Liam but they slowly drifted into the voice of his wife whispering ‘Keep safe, Love.’

Chapter 18

11th November 1918 Salford

The front door burst open and young Laura’s best friend, Amy, was standing there gasping, her cheeks glowing and her fists clenched with suppressed excitement. Edward found it difficult to comprehend how much the girls had changed since he had left four years before. Amy was taller now and more thoughtful, if somewhat constrained by a lack of funds, about her grooming and general appearance. The bloom of the young lady on her cheek only barely restrained the childish impishness which forever played around her eyes and mouth. She had the distracting fascination of a butterfly that wasn’t totally convinced about leaving its rather dishevelled chrysalis.

‘Eh up, Mr Craigie. Are yer still sitting there grumpy then?’ she observed with her usual disarming candour. ‘Is it the bad throat that’s getting yer down?’

‘Aye, well it doesn’t help’ Edward said smiling weakly. ‘You’re looking like the cat that’s found the cream. What’s up, then?’

‘It’s all the excitement going on outside. The fellas standing on the railings at the corner of Cross Lane reckon that the war is finished. They say that the Germans are signing some letter this morning then they’re going ‘ome.’

‘Well, that sounds like good news, Amy. It’s not before time.’

‘Aye, it is. Perhaps me Dad ‘ll be back ‘ome soon. Me Mam says she ‘as a list of jobs to keep ‘im occupied when he gets back,’ Amy enthused.

Edward shuddered and turned away from Amy. He had seen Amy’s Dad, a soldier in Lieutenant William’s platoon, lying dead before they reached the Black Line. Amy’s Mother couldn’t read and had obviously decided that there was always hope without confirmation of the worst.

‘Is your Laura not in then?’ Amy enquired. ‘I was thinking as how we could ‘ave gone a walk up to the Town ‘all to see if the Mayor said owt about it.’

‘They’ve all gone up to their Uncle Jim’s with their Mam. Why don’t you have a walk up there? You’ll probably see them.’

‘Why don’t yer ‘ave a walk up the Lane with me, then? Yer look as though yer could do with a bit of fresh air. Yer getting to look like Marley’s ghost sitting in ‘ere day in day out.’

Edward winced slightly. Amy always had a direct approach and an often discomfiting honesty. He knew, in himself, that he was using his damaged lungs and throat as a not totally justified reason for hardly ever going out. Two weeks before, he had collected his navy blue demob trilby from the Drill Hall and come home. He knew that his breathing was permanently impaired and that he would have to adapt to it.

The family had been delirious to see him and he had been thrilled to be at home. But he wasn’t home as a husband and father. He was only at home. It wasn’t just the fact that he couldn’t even begin to talk to his wife and family about his experiences during the last four years; it was as though his mind had set into some exclusive, distorted and incommunicative consciousness. He was going through the motions of playing the role of a Salford parent and spouse but it was on a different plane to the terrible and controlling reality of his mental state.

Their lack of dependence on him for almost any aspect of family life had developed in order to cope with his four year absence. Now, life for the rest of them just went on, with Edward occasionally caught in the orbit. His wife watched and waited with patience yet his existence, for so long ordered and organised and exposed to the most horrific manifestations of warfare, now seemed drifting and aimless. What he had had before the war couldn’t be reclaimed and what he had been before had been destroyed.

‘Do yer want me to spit on yer ‘air so yer can comb it, cos ‘appen yer’ve not got too much spit with that bad throat of yours?’ Amy’s offer shook Edward out of his reverie.

‘No thanks, Amy. I’m ok. But I think that I’ll stay here for now. I don’t really feel up to going out’ Edward said feebly.

‘Well, yer nowt like someone who’s ok to me. I don’t know about Marley’s ghost. Yer look as if yer sat here with a ghost on each shoulder. ‘Appen a bit of a walk might do summat to bring a bit of colour to yer cheeks.’ Amy’s directness, decorously delivered with her strong Lancashire accent, was hard to resist but Edward was not to be persuaded. It was so much easier to leave things than to make decisions.

When he had woken up in the hospital in Arras with a white ribbon tied round his neck to indicate that he was only to be fed on milk, he had felt hopelessly lost. There was a deep void in the pit of his stomach and a sense of floating helplessly in the middle of a great ocean. There were other, equally redundant, patients and there were professional, caring nurses who fussed about the injured men and tended to their needs. But the sense of purpose that had dominated his life for four years, that had moulded his mind and cemented a mutuality with his pals, had been prematurely terminated.

His war was over and now he belonged nowhere.

‘Well, yer should at least leave them cigs alone; they’ll make yer throat a lot worse,’ Amy counselled.

‘They make it feel a bit easier, but thanks for caring,’ Edward smiled. He didn’t really know how to respond to her rough edged, frank charm.

‘Right. I’ll be off. Don’t finish up like that miserable old divil next door to us.’ She waved and disappeared up the street.

That afternoon, whilst the sirens on the ships in the Docks heralded the onset of peace and people danced in the street, Edward, working tirelessly with a cigarette dangling from his lips, painted the living room and the scullery stark, ascetic, purging white.

Chapter 19

April 1919 Salford

Edward stared at the dying embers in the grate. It would be out soon if he didn’t move. This was a job that he had taken responsibility for, looking after the fire, but sometimes his mind drifted away. He got out of his chair, took some pieces of wood from the bag that his eldest brother, Jim, had sent and placed them carefully on the glowing cinders. There was an almost hypnotic fascination in watching the fire. It had comforting warmth. Coke gave a range of interesting blues and yellows as it burnt. Coal, when you could get it, and wood produced dancing, ever changing vistas of flames that drew you into their centre and painted flickering, shadowy shapes around the room.

The fire orchestrated groups of ethereal, wraith-like people that darted round the white walls; the carters and drovers in the early morning mists of the cattle markets; the dockworkers standing around the railings on Cross Lane corner in the late afternoons of winter; the weary soldiers, rifles at the ready, trudging across the barren, devastated fields of France bathed in the orange-red glow of the inferno of the bombardment; men being ripped apart by high explosive shrapnel shells or mown down by machine gun bullets; Big Charlie, his guts spilling out of his body and his life blood soaking away into the French soil, his face contorted by the pain as he struggled to make his belated avowal of his love for his wife; and Liam, the man at whose side he had walked for so many years and with whom he had shared those troubles and triumphs that are the quirky province of male pals, might also be lying under the cold, French soil.

He had been round to see Dorothy, just after he got back, to explain what a special and quietly heroic man Big Charlie had been, but he got no answer. The neighbours had said that she had moved a month before. Perhaps it was as well. He couldn’t share her grief – she had lost a husband, a lover and a breadwinner out of her sadly incomplete marriage and he had lost a friend with whom he had stood shoulder to shoulder and peered into the depths of hell.

He hadn’t spoken about Liam other than to shrug his shoulders and grunt in reply when anybody enquired about him, and he never asked if there was any news. He knew that he should go and see Bridget but he couldn’t formulate the words to explain how he had witnessed his friend’s mind being torn apart by the polar forces of her purity and the corrosive evil of the war. He knew that his bumbling explanations would sound like a shameful admission of the guilt that he felt for his own complicity in Liam’s degeneration.

The uncertain fate of Liam was a cancer that he could neither face nor resolve but whose eternal contemplation, sat in his chair in his Salford home with the lives of his family flitting around him, gave a discernible shape to the nightmare of industrial scale killing over the four years that had now become his life.

Young Laura came in and put her arm round his shoulders. She bent her head so that it rested against his. The shadows flickering on the wall became him and his childhood friends playing football in Turner Street. The girl from a few doors down, coming back from an errand for her Mam, had joined them but wouldn’t take her turn at goalkeeper because she’d get into trouble if she tore her skirt. He turned and buried his face in the coal tar clean fragrance of his daughter’s red hair. Young Laura was so much like her mother.

‘Hello Pippin. Are you alright?’

‘Yes thanks, I’m ok.’ She answered him briefly but in a way that left an unspoken question hanging in the air.

‘How come you’re not playing out? I thought that you were playing school with Sadie and Mary.’

‘They’re fed up of that now. They’ve gone to play with next door’s puppy and our Ben has gone to the coal yard to help the man clean out the stable. Uncle Jim gives him a penny for every bag of horse manure that he takes up.’

‘Why don’t you help your Mam then?’ Edward asked.

‘Mam’s gone to do her cleaning job and she asked me to look after the girls,’ Laura answered. ‘Dad, you said that when you came home you would take me to see that big Hall on the other side of Ordsall Park.’

‘Aye, well. We’ll have to see when I feel up to it,’ Edward answered evasively.

‘Why don’t we go today? It’s a nice day and the sunshine will do you good,’ Laura persisted. ‘You hardly ever go out now and you’re not going to get better sitting in front of the fire.’ Like Mother, like daughter Edward thought wryly.

‘I know that, Darling,’ Edward said defensively. ‘I just need to wait for my breathing to get a bit better.’

‘Mrs Willoughby says that a breath of fresh air and a drop of cold water never did anybody any harm,’ Laura countered. ‘So do you want me to brew you a mug of tea, then?’