The Book of Ebenezer le Page (24 page)

I am quite sure Raymond didn't have a thought in his head of marrying Christine Mahy. He was friendly with her, as he was friendly with all fellows and girls alike. Later on, when he was blaming himself for everything, he said to me, ‘I made a great mistake when I was a young chap. I used to think girls were human beings like us; but they are not. They are always after something. They are either after your body, or your money, or a father for their children; and, if they are not after your body, or your money, or a father for their children, there is always something they want you to be, or do, that will bring them glory. They are never satisfied to let you be; and be with you.' I said, ‘Well, men are after their own ends too, you know.'

Raymond had the sense not to take Christine to his home; but she took him back to her house Saturday nights when he had a weekend pass. He was made welcome. Bill Mahy, her father, was a long, thin, dreamy chap, who didn't say much, as a rule; but he liked talking to Raymond. He was another for reading books and was much more interested in the why's and the wherefores of everything than in making a living growing, which was his business. Emmeline Mahy, the mother, was a scallywag of a woman; but she was easy-going and made anybody who went there feel at home. There was a daughter-in-law, Edna, who practically lived at Ivy Lodge with her little girl, though she had a home of her own, Rosamunda, across the road. The son, Herbert, who was the eldest of the family, was in the trenches. He had always been the big fat jolly boy, and looked like a barrel in his uniform. He would have finished up like old Dredge, if he had lived; but he was killed through some misunderstanding the day of the Armistice.

Raymond didn't get home sometimes until the early hours of Sunday morning; and when he walked in, he would find Hetty sitting up waiting for him with a face like death. She guessed where he had been, but she daren't ask. Instead, she had laid for him a lovely supper of crab, or lobster, which she knew he liked. ‘Thank you, Ma,' he would say, ‘but I have had something to eat.' He told me how those nights he hated his mother when he came in and found her sitting up waiting for him. If she had gone to bed at her usual time, he would have told her openly in the morning where he had been. As it was, he didn't say a word more; but went to bed and couldn't bring himself even to kiss her good-night.

Hetty breathed again when Christine went back to England. Christine didn't write to Raymond. That ought to have pleased Hetty; but it didn't. ‘Fancy that girl not sending Raymond as much as a postcard,' she said to me. ‘It only go to show how much she think of him.' Hetty was a woman and ought to have known Christine better. She was sure of herself, that girl. When, alas and alack, she had got what she wanted, she said to me once in her sing-song holy voice, ‘I always knew Raymond would be mine in the fullness of time.' She had a way of speaking as if God told her things He didn't tell to other people. The trouble was He didn't tell her everything. However, Hetty soon had another worry. The powers-that-be at the Fort decided the young instructors must do their bit in the trenches, and Raymond was sent back to his platoon to finish his training. ‘If he got to go, I'll die!' she said.

He was lucky. A sickness they called the 'flu broke out at the Fort. It wasn't 'flu really, but something worse. A fellow might get it one day and be dead the next. They buried twenty-six in the Military Cemetery at Fort George in a few days. It happened Raymond was at Fort Hommet doing his firing course when the 'flu was at its worst; and so as those who was there wouldn't catch it, they was kept there. Raymond didn't go back to Fort George until a few days before the Armistice; and so he didn't finish his training after all.

He enjoyed his time at Fort Hommet. It was the nearest he ever got to living like a monk. He said Fort Hommet was so cut off from the world, it might well have been a monastery; except that it was built to defend the island against Napoleon. It was built out on the rocks and had a drawbridge and a moat; and Raymond liked to hear the rough sea beating against the walls outside his window, when he was lying in bed. He was N.C.O. in charge of a barrack-room and had a small corner room to himself. There was an officer supposed to be in charge, but he kept out of the way; and the sergeant had a habit of disappearing and not being seen for days. The fellows was fed like fighting cocks, but wasn't allowed to tire themselves out by doing any work, in case they got bit by the bug. The only parades they had to go on was to line up twice a day and gargle permanganate. The rest of the day they passed lying on their beds yarning, or reading stories by Victoria Cross, or playing cards or housey-housey. Raymond passed his time in his little room reading
Les Misérables
in four volumes in French from beginning to end. Evenings nobody was supposed to go down the narrow neck of land that led to the road; but Alice and Allison Le Page, who was twins and third or fourth cousins of mine, kept a little shop along the Vazon Road and entertained soldiers from Fort Hommet in the room at the back every evening. They wasn't whores, but they liked the boys. Raymond didn't go and see my cousins; but often on my way home from work, I'd meet him going to Wallaballoo on his bike to have a good supper. Nobody at Fort Hommet got the 'flu.

Mr Dorey took me aside one day and told me I must expect my calling-up papers early in the New Year. He couldn't hang on to me any longer. Most of the young Guernseymen was killed off and it was now the turn of us older ones to take their place. I didn't care. The sovereigns was mounting up in the pied-du-cauche and my mother would be all right. She could employ an old man and a boy; and Tabitha would keep an eye on her. I began looking at my book of Army Instructions I learnt from when I was a sergeant in the Militia; but the Lee Enfield rifles was different now, and there was Lewis and Hotschiss machine-guns come along since. It didn't seem my training as a soldier was going to be much use. One thing I decided I would do before I went: and that was go and see Phoebe. I wanted to see the kids, if nothing else. I had seen Eileen with her young husband in Town, and sometimes the older Sarchet and his wife; but never Phoebe.

I went one Saturday afternoon. I can't say how I felt when I put my bike against the wall. A lot of mad thoughts was going through my head. I thought I'll take Phoebe in my arms and say, ‘Come on, old girl, we both belonged to Jim, let's be friends now; and if I come back from the War, I'll be father to his children.' Yes, I even thought I might marry her. I walked up the path and knocked on the front door. Phoebe opened it. She stood staring at me as if she was seeing a ghost; and then began to laugh. ‘He's not in!' she shrieked. ‘He's not in! He's not in!' and burst into wild crying and slammed the door in my face.

The Armistice came on me without me knowing: the same as the War had done. I was clearing up inside one of the greenhouses down the Vineries when a chap rushed in and said ‘The War is over!' and the sirens and whistles began going like billyo down St Sampson's. The next minute every fellow was out of the Vineries and round the corner into Hutton's pub, though Mr Dorey was temperance himself and didn't like his men drinking. I had a couple and went home. When I got in Hetty was in the kitchen, laughing and crying. ‘Raymond won't have to go!' she was saying, all excited, ‘it's too good to be true!' My mother wasn't excited. She was sitting quietly with her hands in her lap. ‘The end is not yet,' she said.

I think the way the War ended broke my mother's heart. She had expected something different. I don't know quite what; but it wasn't men sitting around a table signing a paper. I never really knew or understood all the funny ideas my mother had in her head. I do know she never had hope of anything much after Armistice Day. Perhaps I am more like my mother than I think; for I had my blackest thoughts that day.

It is easy to say years after the event that at eleven o'clock in the morning on the eleventh of November in the year nineteen hundred and eighteen I knew there was going to be another war; but I did. I was thinking about it all the afternoon while I was working in the garden. The only mistake I made was I didn't think there was going to be as long as twenty years before it came. I was sure, anyway, the rejoicing was in vain. Nobody who was not alive at that time can imagine how senseless everybody was on Armistice Day. It wasn't only relief from anxiety for those who was gone away; or because it was victory for our side. It was the end of the war that was going to end all wars. Never again! Never again! The Kingdom of Heaven was round the corner.

I went to Town in the evening because everybody else was going. I asked my mother to come with me, but she wouldn't. Hetty and Prissy was there, arm-in-arm; and the two husbands together behind. There wasn't room to move properly anywhere; and you just had to go with the crowd and was pushed. I talked to this one and that one in passing; and had a few drinks. The public houses was doing a roaring trade; but what they had left was only slops, and there was more on the floor than in the pint-pot. I saw Raymond with a crowd of fellows from the Fort; and he waved. He looked happy. I tried to look happy too; but I couldn't keep it up. I squeezed my way down the Pollet, where I had left my bike in Grey's cycle-shop at the bottom; and I had a last wet at the Red Lion on the way home. They was singing:

It was only half-past nine when I got indoors. My mother was just getting ready to go to bed, and left me to eat my supper by myself. I didn't go to bed for hours. I sat by the fire thinking. I reckon I thought of everything had happened to me and to all the people I knew until then. I thought well, if that is what being alive in this world is, it don't amount to much. A happy day and dreams of something coming; and then you wake up. A few pleasures you forget the minute they are over; and, for the rest, just go on and on and on like a donkey. That is what I am. A Guernsey donkey. Sometimes I stick my heels in and sometimes I kick out and sometimes I lift up my head to heaven and bray. I don't know if there's anything after, I'm sure. I do know if all the people on Guernsey go to heaven who think they're going, there won't half be some family rows up there. For myself, I've had enough of my relations down here. If I rise from the dead and know who I am, it's Jim I want to meet again.

Raymond was among the first to be demobbed. He got a fortnight's leave for Christmas, and then went back to the Fort for two or three days and was out. Most of the Guernsey boys at the Fort was out pretty soon; but those who was in France only trickled back in twos or threes over the months. Amos Duquemin, I remember, didn't come back until the summer; but he was one of those who was with the Army of Occupation in Cologne. He said he had a good time and was made a fuss of by the Germans, who was as glad as he was the War was over. He liked the Germans better than he did the French; but, for all that, if he went down the back streets of a night, it was with three or four British Tommies, in case the Jerries wasn't as friendly as they made out. He would have been surprised if he had known what was going to happen, and so would I, for that matter, even if I did know another war was coming. He lived through two occupations, and died only last year. The second time he was one of those occupied by the sons, perhaps, of those who he had occupied twenty or, to be exact, twenty-one years before. It make you to think.

Raymond came to see me in civvies; but he hadn't gone back to his sloppy clothes. He was in a bluey-grey suit made to measure that fitted him perfectly, and of very good material; and he wasn't wearing a hat, and his hair was blowing in the wind. I hadn't noticed before he had curly hair; but perhaps it only began to curl when he was in the Army. I said, ‘Well, how d'you like having to do some work for a change, instead of swinging the lead at Fort Hommet?' He laughed. ‘I don't do any work at the Greffe,' he said. ‘I sit on a high stool and read the livres de perchage.' ‘Goodness, what are those?' I said. He said, ‘Didn't you know that every douit and every hedge and every inch and square inch of land on Guernsey is weighed and measured, and has been for centuries?' ‘I hope not,' I said. ‘There is a flat patch at the top of the gully I don't think belong to anybody. If I was to move my hedge back a few yards, I could save it from going to waste.' ‘It belongs to somebody all right,' he said, ‘probably to an old lady living in Torteval. There is only one way of getting hold of it.' ‘How's that?' I said. ‘I'll give you an instance,' he said. ‘Monsieur Le Brun from the Hook Chook owns a field that is in the shape of a triangle. It isn't big enough to swing a cat. Monsieur Le Blanc, his next-door neighbour, owns a field that is in the shape of a square, minus the small triangle in one corner. He asks Monsieur Le Brun to sell him the triangle; but, of course, Monsieur Le Brun won't. Ah, but Monsieur Le Brun has a daughter, an only child; and Monsieur Le Blanc has a son, an eldest son. The eldest son is given a hint by his father as to what he must do; and he does it. By the next generation, the triangle has disappeared and the other field is square and belongs to the Le Blanc family in perpetuity.' ‘I'd rather remain single,' I said, ‘and go without the patch of ground.' Well, I have remained single; but I might have done better if I had left that patch of ground alone. It have landed me into a lot of trouble, one way and another.

‘The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof,' said Raymond, ‘but not in Guernsey. In Guernsey land is worshipped first and money next and the Lord last, if at all.' He was laughing, as if it was a great joke. ‘I'm going to be an odd sort of minister,' he said. I said, ‘Are you really going to be a minister, Raymond?' He said, ‘Of course I am going to be a minister. I can read the New Testament in Greek.' I said, ‘Is that all you got to be able to do to be a minister?' He said, ‘I will pass an exam in June and go to College in September; and when I come out I will have a certificate saying I can bury, marry, and give birth. As you said to me once, we'll see.'