We've Come to Take You Home (4 page)

EIGHT

March 1917

S
HE LAY THERE, HUNCHED
up beside her mother and her baby brother, underneath the mound of old clothes and blankets they had piled on top of the mattress to try and keep themselves warm.

The three of them shared the same bed. It had been four when her father had been at home; her parents in the middle, her baby brother between them, with Jess curled up on the edge of the lumpy, straw-filled mattress beside her mother. In the summer it was always too hot. Even with the window and the cottage door left open, she would lie there, tossing and turning, the flies buzzing around, desperately trying to get some sleep.

But it wasn't summer; it was the first week of March and the worst winter in living memory was continuing on into spring. There was still snow on the ground and more was expected. In the morning, the inside of the cottage's one window was coated with ice, which would melt during the day only to freeze up again when the sun went down. But this winter had been so cold that the ice never melted. It had stayed there, getting thicker by the day. There was no coal around, at least not in the village, and if there had been it would have been too expensive to buy. The only way to keep warm was to stay in bed.

But this morning, there was a glimmer of sunshine, the first Jess had seen for days, seeping through the threadbare blanket nailed up over the window.

She pulled on the boots that had been passed down to her by her mother four years ago. They were too large, had holes in the soles and had never had laces. Stuffed with balled up pages of newspaper, they stayed on unless she tried to run or kick something. She tugged a coat out of the pile of clothing heaped up on the bed. It had been repaired and patched so many times that there was almost nothing left of the original coat her mother had first worn, over twenty years ago, when she went up to London to go into service.

There was no sound, no movement, from the bed. Her mother must be still asleep. Jess walked across to the table. She opened the drawer and took out a knife, its blade tucked inside a leather sheath. She put it in the right hand pocket of the coat – the only pocket without a hole. She hesitated. A lump of stale bread, the size of her fist, was sitting on top of the table. Should she? Or shouldn't she? It was the only food they had left in the house. She slipped it into the same pocket.

A blast of cold air hit her as she stepped outside. With the sun out, and snow no longer falling, she wouldn't be the only one coming out to search for food. She slipped and slithered round the side of the cottage to the lean-to where her father kept his tools. She lifted the snare down off the hook, and the club down off the wooden shelf. She put both in a bag made out of sacking.

Down the garden, through the gate, and instead of turning left towards the lane, which led up onto the ridge, she turned right. Each morning her father had been away, and whatever the weather, sun, rain or snow, she'd followed this same path to the old oak that stood, alone and proud, in the centre of the field.

She drew her father's knife out of its sheath and scratched a line, the length of her little finger, deep down, into the bark of the old tree. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven lines. One more week. Today, it was exactly three hundred and
eighteen days, just under eleven months, since her father had left for France.

In the summer, when the ground was dry, Butt's Brow was just a short walk away. But not today. There was either ice underfoot or mud, sometimes both. One foot slid to the right, the other to the left, leaving her struggling to stay upright. She tried cutting across the middle of a field but the mud was thicker, and even more slippery, than around the edge. One boot was sucked off then the other. She wanted to give up, turn around and go home, but she couldn't. Not without taking back some food.

The war that should have been over in four months was now into its third year. And the Germans, the enemy, weren't just fighting on land. They were also fighting at sea. The shelves in the grocer's shop were often empty: no sugar, no lard, no flour, as more and more merchant ships were torpedoed to the bottom of the ocean.

Her mother received an allowance of fourteen shillings a week from the government and her father sent home whatever he had managed to save out of his seven shillings a week wage. But the two combined came well below what he had been bringing home when he had worked as a labourer on the local farms. They lived off bread: a slice for breakfast, another slice for lunch and another slice in the afternoon for tea. And, if they were lucky, and her father had been able to send more money than usual, they had potatoes, plainly boiled, for supper. She couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten butter. But both the bread and the potatoes had doubled in price. A single loaf now cost one whole, precious silver shilling.

Summer, late afternoon, was the best time to catch a rabbit. Today, on this icy cold morning, she would be lucky to get one. But this was where her father always came. And rabbits, like humans, had to eat. Jess set the snare and then placed the bait – the lump of stale bread. She crouched down behind a bush.

Just as the sun was dipping below the trees, a young doe hopped out of a burrow. It sniffed, sniffed again and took another hop forward. It took a nibble at the bread. Its head went through the noose. Another nibble, another hop and it was trapped, the wire round its neck getting tighter and tighter with every frantic kick and wriggle. Jess raised her father's club. The rabbit thrashed from side to side. The snare snapped. And the pie, soup and dumplings, that would have kept the three of them fed for a whole week, hopped down into a burrow.

Her mother said nothing when Jess showed her the broken snare. When she tried to explain about the lump of bread, how it too had disappeared, with the rabbit, down into the burrow, her mother just turned away. There would be nothing to eat that night. Not for anyone.

NINE

April 1917

S
HE WAS CROUCHED DOWN
in the gutter, in the centre of the cobbled street, and she was about to do what her father and mother had always forbidden her to do. But she had no choice.

On each of the three hundred and twenty-eight days that her father had been away, Jess had listened to the clink and clatter of metal on wood, as her mother separated the precious silver shillings, and then the bronze pennies, half pennies and farthings into four neat piles on top of the table. And when her mother had counted each individual coin, in each separate pile, Jess had counted too, in a whisper, so that she could not be heard.

Over the weeks and the months, the piles of coins had gone down from four to three as the shillings had disappeared, then the pennies and then the half pennies. Last night, when her mother had picked up the blue and white jug, there had been no clinking and no whispering; there had been no coins to count, none at all, not even a single brass farthing.

Jess crawled, on her knees, round and through a queue of people, under a market stall and up to a shopping basket. She stretched out a hand. The bread was still warm. And with the warmth came anger. Anger that a stranger could afford to buy this bread while she, her mother and her brother were being forced to live off nettles, dandelions, and turnip tops.

The loaf was large, too large to hide. She ripped off one end and, crouching forward, knotted it inside the frayed
cotton of her underskirt. She put the rest of the loaf back in the basket with the torn end facing down. She crawled out from under the stall. She staggered to her feet and, with the stolen bread bouncing awkwardly against her legs, walked as fast as she could, so fast she was almost running, across the road to the opposite side of the street. Pushing through a line of women queuing up to buy food, she was about to step into the safety of an alleyway when she stopped to look back.

A woman was staring at her. She was wearing a tightly buttoned grey coat and on her right arm there was a black mourning band. At her feet, on the ground, was the shopping basket and inside it, torn side up, was the loaf of bread.

Jess wanted to run, slip away into the darkness, but her body, her legs, refused to obey. And then the woman nodded her head, so slight but still a nod, and the force that had prevented Jess from moving released its hold.

She ducked into the alley. Walls towered up on either side. Turning left and then right, then left and right again, she came out at the bottom of the main street just in front of the flint-stone church.

She took the right fork, running on past the post boy pushing his bicycle, inch by inch, up the hill. Houses gave way to cottages, the cottages to fields. The road narrowed into a white chalk track. She looked ahead and behind. No one was following her. She unknotted the bread from inside her underskirt. She sniffed it. She nibbled a corner. It was her due; she'd had the idea, she'd taken the risk and she'd done the running. Her mother would never know. She sank her teeth down into its doughy warmth.

She was standing exactly where she and her father had stood almost a year ago, the morning he had left home to go to the barracks at Winchester. Down below, on the other side of the ridge, she could see their cottage, tucked away at the edge of the woods, at the bottom of the valley.

The door was shut and the curtains drawn. There was no smoke curling out of the chimney and there was no washing hanging out on the line. And the garden, where her mother had spent so much of her time, digging up, clearing and planting vegetables, was now choked with weeds. The cottage was no longer a home: it was a tomb.

She ran down the track, through the gate and up the path to the door. She tore down the blanket she had helped her mother to nail up at the start of the winter. It was time to let in some fresh air and sunshine.

‘Mum, Mum, I've got us some bread.'

The figure curled up on the bed, under the mound of clothes and blankets, shifted.

‘Look, Mum, bread, I've got us some bread.'

Her mother sat up.

‘We can't afford bread…'

Her mother took hold of her arm.

‘How did you get it? Did you steal it?'

Her grip tightened.

‘Did you? Tell me, did you steal it?'

‘It was a present, a present from a lady in the market…'

‘What have you been doing? Why would a lady like that want to give people like us a present?'

‘She felt sorry for us.'

She felt no guilt, none whatsoever, sitting at the kitchen table, watching her mother feeding pieces of bread, soaked in water, to her baby brother. It didn't matter that the bread had been stolen. She was keeping them alive, making sure they would all still be there to welcome her father when he came back home.

She could see it. A summer's evening, the sun dropping down behind the trees, her mother, holding her brother, both plump cheeked and laughing, and herself, standing in the doorway, watching her father dressed in his soldier's
uniform, a pack on his back, stride down the hill towards the cottage.

There was a loud rap. Her mother looked up.

‘See who that is, Jess.'

She knew who it was. She didn't have to open the door. It was her father. He was standing there, smiling, waiting to be let in, his head cocked to one side, his fingers tapping impatiently.

‘Jess? Did you hear?'

He would get his old job back on the farm. They would be able to afford medicine for her brother and coal for the fire to keep them warm. There would be stews bubbling on the range and mugs of steaming hot tea and slabs of fresh bread, with butter and a slice of cheese, sometimes even ham, for a treat on a Sunday. They would be happy. They would be a family again.

She opened the door.

‘Mrs. Brown? Edith Brown?'

The post boy wiped the sweat off his face with the back of his hand.

‘That's my mother.'

Jess took the brown envelope with OHMS printed on the front.

‘Thank you.'

The post boy walked away down the path.

She closed the door. She tore open the envelope. She took out the sheet of paper. She unfolded the letter.

“It is my duty to inform you that a report has been received from the War Office notifying the death of William John Brown.”

TEN

‘Y
OU DID SAY
M
R
. Foster?'

The receptionist checked her computer.

‘Mr. Michael Foster.'

It had taken half an hour to get there. One minute her mother was upset. The next minute she was angry. At every left turn, right turn, traffic light, roundabout and T-junction, she repeated that Sam's father was fine. He was at the airport. The hospital had phoned the wrong person.

‘Yes. That's right. Look, there's been some mistake. My husband–'

‘Seaview Road. Number seven? That's the address he's given us. Is that where you live, Mrs Foster?

‘Yes…'

It was her father. So how had the accident happened? It was impossible to believe that he had caused it; he was too careful a driver. Unlike her mother who thought nothing of overtaking in the inside lane and always accelerated when the traffic lights were changing to red, her father obeyed every chapter, paragraph, sentence, comma and full stop of the Highway Code.

If it said check your mirror, he checked it not twice but three times. Too much to the left, too much to the right, too much sticking out the front, too much sticking out the back, parking a car was no different to docking a Boeing; it required exactly the same amount of precision. All that was missing was the man wearing the metal earmuffs, walking backwards, waving him in.

‘Mrs Foster, if you'd just like to take a seat, I'll let them know you're here.'

Her mother's mobile shrilled out.

‘It's Dad's work. Hello, yes, Rachel Foster speaking…'

Her father never drank the day before he flew. Whether they were having supper out or giving a party, it was a rule he would never break, not ever, however great the temptation. And last night would have been no different.

‘Yes, we're at the hospital. We've only just got here. Yes, in the accident and emergency department. No, Mike didn't phone. The hospital did. Yes, I will, as soon as I know. No problem. Bye.'

‘Mrs Foster?'

‘Yes?'

‘Hi, I'm Kelly, one of the team looking after your husband. If you'd like to follow me…'

Sam had expected crowds of disgruntled people, some drunk, many of them shouting. But the waiting area was empty except for a smartly dressed couple, sitting together, holding hands, talking quietly to themselves, and a young man in a hoodie eyeing up the refreshment machine. Nobody was bleeding.

Her mother had fallen over, several years ago, when carrying a large blue and white bowl from the sitting room into the kitchen. A piece of broken china had embedded itself into her leg, just below the knee. She'd insisted on pulling it out there and then. Blood had sprayed everywhere, all over her mother, all over the floor, all down the cupboards. The next thing Sam remembered was hearing someone repeating her name. When she opened her eyes she was lying on the kitchen floor and her mother, sitting upright on a chair with a blood-soaked towel knotted round her knee, was asking her father whether he thought they should take Sam to a hospital.

‘Your husband was brought in by ambulance, Mrs Foster.'

‘But how did it happen? My husband's a pilot. He flies planes…'

They walked through a set of double doors. Stretching out in front of them was another white-walled corridor.

‘Yes, he's told us.'

Kelly's smile was tight-lipped.

‘He also told us that he was on his way to work, driving along, and there was a girl standing on the pavement. She walked out right in front of him. Whether it was accidental, she didn't see him coming, or deliberate we don't know. Your husband's given the police a description.'

‘Has he been badly hurt, the person who phoned didn't say?'

‘His seatbelt was faulty. When he braked, to avoid hitting her, he went straight into the windscreen. Got quite a nasty knock on the head…'

They stopped. The corridor widened out. There was a line of cubicles on either side. Each individual cubicle contained a couple of chairs and a lamp attached to the wall over a trolley bed. But only one had a curtain drawn across its entrance.

‘The x-rays and scan show nothing abnormal but your husband really should stay here overnight, for observation, to make sure that everything is fine, just in case there is any complication, but he won't hear of it. We were rather hoping you might be able to get him to change his–'

Her mother shook her head.

‘You've got the wrong person…'

The cubicle curtain jerked open. And there was her father.

‘I want my car keys, I want my mobile, and I want them now.'

‘He only listens to his auto-pilot.'

The doors they had just walked through crashed open. A trolley, surrounded by doctors and nurses, smashed past. Lying on the trolley was an elderly man. As the trolley crashed
through a second set of double doors at the far end of the corridor, Sam caught a glimpse of a brilliantly lit, white room with figures, wearing gloves, face masks and green overalls, standing round what looked like an operating table.