The Sons of Adam (19 page)

And one wonderful day, 11 November 1918, peace was declared.

Up and down the Western Front, men dropped their guns and stared at each other with something like bliss. A corporal from Alan’s former platoon, who’d survived four years of war without a scratch, dropped all his equipment on the ground and climbed out of the trench. He stood up. The chilly November air snaked around him, but no bullets, no shells. He removed his helmet and threw it high into the air. ‘You can push off now,
Kameraden,
’ he shouted across to the German lines. ‘We can all bugger off home.’

Down in the trench, his astonished comrades cheered.

’Tis very strange but I declare

The world seems half insane,

The new disease as all will swear

Is Oil upon the Brain.

I saw a man whose garments bore

The marks of much free soil

And yet he cared not what he wore:

Beneath the stains was OIL.

from ‘Petroleum, Petroleum’
by O.I.L. Wells

Four miles from Whitcombe. Candles glimmered from cottage windows. There was a smell of wet leaves, woodsmoke, the sweet strong odour of cattle.

The date was 14 December 1918, thirty-three days after Armistice Day. Tom had walked and hitchhiked to the Dutch port of Rotterdam. He’d caught a lift on a steamer and stepped off the dock in Southampton, a free man with nowhere to go but home.

His pace quickened. He felt a sudden overpowering urge to see his father again; to hear his voice, slow in speech, but full of warmth. Whatever lies were told up at the big house, Jack Creeley would never turn away his one and only son.

Tom walked faster, till he was almost running. Arriving undetected at his father’s cottage, Tom tapped on the door and swung it open. But there, instead of Jack’s sturdy figure, a stranger was seated at the fire: an old man, white-haired. The stranger turned in his chair and stared.

‘Who’s that? Who’s that there? Come in, lad, I can’t see your face.’

‘My father? Is he … ? Where’s my father?’

‘Creeley, by God! Tom Creeley! And we thought you dead!’

Now Tom recognised the stranger. It was old Bertie Johnson, owner of a covered wagon, and the village carrier back when Tom was a youngster.

‘No, Bertie, I’m alive all right. Where’s my pa? He’s moved house, has he? Not head gardener, is he?’

The head gardener had the grandest cottage of the little row of four. It had long been Jack’s aspiration to possess it one day.

‘Moved house, Tom, in a manner of speaking. He’s with Our Lord now, God rest his soul.’

‘Dead? My father’s dead?’ The news was unbelievable. Tom crashed down on the rush-bottomed seat by the table. In all his time as a prisoner, he had been through seemingly every possible permutation of how matters might stand at home. He had imagined anger, love, forgiveness, hostility, even that long-postponed court martial. But he. had never once imagined this.

For a few minutes he sat in devastated silence, too shocked even to cry. Old man Johnson poked around in a cupboard and brought out bread, a dish of pork dripping, a bowl of apples and nuts. His movements were silent and respectful.

‘How?’ said Tom at last. ‘What happened? I can’t believe …’

Johnson sat down beside Tom, his hands on the table. At rest, they still held the shape of invisible reins, as though he were guiding his horses through the night.

‘It was the flu, lad. As if the war wasn’t bad enough, God had to send the flu as well. It took your pa, Jonah Hinton from the Tirrold Farm cottages, that pretty Jenny Manders, old Maggie Manders’ girl, not to mention …’

Johnson recited the names of the dead. Tom knew that the flu epidemic had been terrible, but the list of names beggared belief.

‘I can’t believe it. My father! Of all people!’

‘He didn’t suffer,’ said the old man gently. ‘One week, he was digging over the kitchen garden. The next week he was up at the churchyard beneath the ground … But you’re right, lad. It wasn’t the flu that did for him, it was the grieving.’

‘He believed me dead?’

‘So did we all, so did we all.’

‘I wrote to him.’

‘You were captured?’

‘Yes.’

‘In prison?’

‘Yes.’

‘These things go astray, I suppose.’

‘I wrote not once, but twice. The other men got answers.’

And food, Tom might have added. And a chance of survival.

‘He was no great hand at letters, your pa, but he’d never have just left you there, not knowing. He believed you dead, lad, I swear it.’

Bertie Johnson fell silent. With a flash of insight, Tom remembered that the village postman usually left letters for the estate workers at the lodge at the park gates. If the Montagues had decided Tom was better off dead, then nothing could have been simpler than to intercept the letters and destroy them. No wonder Jack Creeley believed he’d lost his only son.

For a long time, Tom stared into the fire, trying to make sense of things. But his loss was too great. He felt nothing but shock. He staggered heavily to his feet.

‘Bertie, I’m off. And look, just one thing. Promise me that you’ll tell no one, all right? Nobody. I don’t want anyone to know I’ve been. Let them think I’m dead. There’s no one here any more. No one for me. Promise me, Bertie.’

Bertie was speaking again, but Tom couldn’t even face the effort of making sense of his words. There was bread and dripping still on the table. Tom tore the bread in two and dunked his half into the bowl of dripping. It would be his supper tonight. He put an apple in his pocket. ‘Tell nobody. Promise me.’

The old man nodded. If he had an expression on his face, Tom didn’t know what it said.

‘Promise me, Bertie.’

‘I promise.’

Tom left. He set out on the open road, heading north.

The village green was sown with crosses: low oak crosses, each one decked with flowers from Pamela’s hothouse. In time, of course, there would be a memorial in stone. A memorial to the bright-faced Whitcombe lads who had never come home. But every village in England wanted such a memorial now and the stone-cutters had more work than they could handle.

The church service concluded. The mourners mingled and dispersed. The crosses sat out in a light December rain. Thirteen crosses. And one of them – the one with more flowers than any other – was marked ‘Lieut. Thomas Creeley, MC, 1893–1916’.

After a sombre lunch had passed in quiet remembrance, Sir Adam called Alan to his study.

‘Listen, my boy, I have some good news for you.’ Sir Adam drew some papers from a desk drawer and pushed them across to his son. ‘The good news is that I’ve arranged for the oil concession to be put into your name. Just sign here and the thing’s done. And, by golly, how you’ve earned it.’

Alan signed, with a feeling of quiet joy.
The concession.
More than any wooden cross or any carving in stone, the concession would be Tom’s best memorial. Of course, the odds were heavily stacked against success. But Tom’s spirit in heaven wouldn’t mind failure. What mattered would be that Alan gave it his best go, that he did the very best he could. And Alan would need to call upon everything he’d ever learned from Tom. Daring, passion, stubbornness, charm, brilliance.

‘Thank you, Father. I can’t tell you how much this means.’

‘Then it’s lucky you don’t have to, my boy. I’d have liked to give you a little money as well. But to be perfectly blunt, I can’t do it. The war’s done my finances no good – no good at all. You’ll have your allowance, of course, but I’ve nothing else to give you. Not without digging into Guy’s share of the estate, anyway. I’ve spoken to him about it and he’s declined. I’m not sure he’s been exactly generous, but I’m afraid he’s within his rights.’

‘Of course. I understand.’

‘So I can give you the concession, but as for money to drill there … I’m afraid I can offer you nothing.’

‘That’s perfectly all right. It’s the concession I want, not money.’

‘But you’ll find it a damned awkward thing to make a go of the concession without some money in your pocket.’

‘I dare say.’

‘And Lottie, dear boy – she may not care to marry a pauper. Have you thought how this arrangement will affect her?’

Alan shrugged. He thought of the village green: the oak crosses covered with flowers, the names of the dead, the sad December rain. ‘I have to have the concession, Father. Have to.’

‘For Tom?’

‘Yes, for Tom.’

‘You made him a promise?’

‘I
did
make him a promise. My most solemn promise, not long before he died. But even if I hadn’t, the agreement had been made between us years before. I couldn’t break it.’

‘You know how the odds lie against you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Old D’Arcy almost failed and we thought his purse was bottomless.’

‘I know.’

‘Your mind’s made up?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You’re a stubborn fool.’

Alan smiled. Coming from Sir Adam, that was a compliment.

Liverpool.

One of the greatest ports in Europe, and all Tom encountered was ragged kids, the smell of urine, the sharp stink of poverty that four years of war had done nothing to purge.

Tom walked quickly through the streets, down to the docks. He soon found what he was looking for. An American cargo ship, the SS
Calloway,
had just arrived, with seven hundred and fifty head of cattle mooing in the hold, and two thousand sheep bleating hopelessly on the hurricane deck. Tom ran up the gangplank and offered his services to the captain. The broad American face looked him up and down, noting the officer’s tunic, the medal ribbon, and its state of age and decay.

‘You want to rope cattle?’ The American’s voice was disbelieving.

‘Yes – yes, sir.’

‘You ever worked on ship before?’

‘No, but I’ve worked with animals.’

The American wiped his chin with the back of his hand and spat over the side of the boat into the turbid water. He laughed. ‘Is that what the King gave you a medal for? … Hell no, sorry, I didn’t mean anything. Sure. We need hands. A couple of the steers got loose last night and we’ve got four men bleeding all over the sickbay.’

‘Thank you.’

There was a pause. The American seemed transfixed by the uniform and its medal ribbon.

‘Listen, bud, you might want to change your coat. These here cattle are true-born Yankees. They might not know how to respect the King’s uniform and all, on top of which, some of them ain’t too good as sailors and the cattle deck ain’t too wholesome right now.’ The smell coming up from the ship’s well suggested that the American was, if anything, understating matters.

Tom gritted his teeth and shook his head.

‘No other coat, eh?’

Tom shook his head again, feeling a flash of inappropriate temper mixed with shame at his poverty.

‘Hell … Goddamn.’

The American thought for a moment, then stuck his hand in his pocket and brought out some money: a mixture of paper and coin, dollars and pounds. He sorted through his change and gave Tom some English money. ‘Go get yourself a coat, then get back here quick as you can. We lost two days on the crossing, so we need to get these cows out at the double.’