The Summer Before the War

by Helen Simonson

  “She is a wonderful girl,” he said again, in the firm tone of a man who hopes repetition will reinforce truth. Perhaps she betrayed her surprise, for he flushed and looked as if he might have more to say to her. But the train’s whistle could be heard, out on the marsh, announcing its imminent arrival at the level crossing, and the moment was lost.

  “Please know I will be thinking of you and Daniel,” she said. Her heart was a tumult of confusion, and it was a sharp satisfaction not to include Miss Ramsey. But no sooner had Hugh left than she regretted her pettiness. It was not becoming, she thought, and promised that her thoughts in the days ahead would be all for the two cousins and the terrible loss of their friend.

  —

  Still thinking of Hugh Grange on Monday, and trying not to dwell on what might have been spoken had the tyranny of the railway schedules not interfered, Beatrice arrived at school to find all in chaos and excitement. Mr. Dimbly had enlisted. With no notice to the school, he had followed the call from Colonel Wheaton and signed up right at the fete. He now appeared in his uniform to let the Headmaster know that he would not be conducting classes today but was reporting to the camp on the next train. Miss Clauvert had collapsed in paroxysms of grief in the staff room, and while Miss Devon vainly attempted to minister to her by dabbing eau de cologne on her temples, children ran amok in the hallways and shrieked in the classrooms. The Headmaster tried to restore order by bellowing in various directions, making menacing moves with his stick as children skipped past the staff room door.

  “Miss Nash, thank goodness you have arrived,” said the Headmaster. “Please help Mr. Dobbins to gather the pupils for an immediate assembly to bid farewell to our erstwhile colleague. Such an unnecessary disruption.” He disappeared in the direction of the library, and Beatrice looked from the distraught Miss Clauvert to the shamefaced Mr. Dimbly and took charge.

  “Mr. Dimbly, since you are here, let us assemble the children so they may give you a proper send-off,” she said. “If you’ll take your form and Miss Devon’s, I’ll bring Miss Clauvert’s room and my own.”

  “Of course, Miss Nash. Good idea,” he said, relieved to move beyond the awkward announcement and female tears. He held the door open for her, and as they passed into the hallway, which was, for one moment, free of grubby schoolchildren, he added, “I was wondering, Miss Nash, if I might ask you to write to me?”

  “To write, Mr. Dimbly?” she asked.

  “At the front,” he said. “In the midst of all the danger, it would be a comfort, you see, to have letters to keep close to my heart.” He gazed at her in what she could only assume was a meaningful manner. He seemed very red about the ears and almost cross-eyed in his earnest stare.

  “You might do better to keep them dry and secure in your barracks, Mr. Dimbly,” she said. “I imagine conditions may become very wet and muddy.”

  “I could wrap them in oilcloth,” he said. He seemed confused, as if the conversation were not going as he had hoped. “I’m not sure what one is supposed to do.”

  “If you let me know where to send correspondence, I would be honored to write you a line now and then,” she said, taking pity on him. “I am sure I can find a few amusing stories about our little school to pass on to you, if you would find such stories welcome?”

  “Thank you, Miss Nash,” he said. He grabbed her hand and kissed it. “It stiffens the resolve of any soldier to know he has loving thoughts coming to him from home.” He hurried off down the hallway before she could object to such a characterization. Shaking her head, she dismissed Mr. Dimbly from her mind and went to her classroom to begin the herding of her flock.

  Mr. Dimbly was sent off to war with several loud hymns and a little speech from the Headmaster that managed to telegraph his disapproval to the staff while prompting rousing cheers from the pupils. It was only after all the excitement, when Beatrice finally managed to quell the chatter in her class, that she realized there was another absence.

  “Where is Snout—I mean Master Sidley?” she asked Upper Latin. There was an awkward silence and some nudging among the desks, and then Jack got to his feet, with great reluctance.

  “He went and enlisted,” he said. “Didn’t want us to say nothing until it was all set, miss.”

  “Enlisted? Fifteen is not old enough to enlist,” said Beatrice. Her knuckles whitened as she gripped her desk and struggled to keep her voice even.

  “Happen his dad signed for him as giving his permission,” said Jack.

  “Jack’s dad wouldn’t give his permission,” said Arty. “On account of Jack having to do the important war work of managing sheep.” A chorus of baa sounds and laughter echoed around the classroom as Jack turned very red.

  “At least I tried,” he said, his voice a hard sneer. “Some people are too much the coward to even try.”

  “Are you calling me a coward?” asked Arty, jumping to his feet. “I’ll have you know I’m in the scouts, patrolling every night while you sleep safe in your bed like a little girl.”

  “Who you calling a girl?” asked Jack, balling up his fists.

  “Sit down before I knock both of your heads together,” said Beatrice, her voice fierce. She strode to Arty’s desk and stood over him. “Is this a joke to you, this war?”

  “No, miss,” said Arty, sullen as he sat down.

  “Both of you, all of you—do you think it makes you some kind of patriot to goad and bully others about enlisting?”

  “No, miss,” chorused the class.

  “Is this how you honor those like Mr. Dimbly who are even now preparing for the front?”

  “No, miss,” came the chorus, quieter and more sullen. One of the girls, Jane, started to cry.

  “What we must do to support our soldiers is to do the work set before us and to help each other as best we can,” she said. “It is time to put aside your childish name-calling and your silly games.” There were more than a few sniffles now. Beatrice went to the tall windows and looked out onto the sunny day without seeing it.

  “I’m really sorry, miss,” came a voice. It was Arty.

  “Me too, miss,” said Jack. “Me and Arty didn’t mean nothing, miss.”

  “Did Snout really enlist, Jack?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes, miss. Off to big adventures in France and three square meals a day, he said, miss.”

  “He’s never been beyond Hastings, miss,” said Arty. “Not as how many of us have.”

  “War is a very hard duty, and people die doing it,” said Beatrice. “I hope you will all listen when I say it is not some schoolboy adventure story.” She went to the blackboard to write the day’s quotation with squeaking chalk: Nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo.

  But today she could not see the glory in the quote’s famous promise to dead warriors that time would remember them. All she could see were two young Trojan boys, filled with bravado and youthful foolishness, going together to their slaughter. She remained at the blackboard a moment as she struggled to compose her face, and when she looked around, all the heads were lowered, the sniffling quiet. The excitement of the day had dribbled from the room.

  “Who wants to begin translating our Virgil this morning?” she said in as gentle a voice as possible.

  —

  After school, Beatrice made her way to the western edge of the town, where businesses and workmen’s cottages crowded towards the riverside wharf. The forge was a low, ramshackle building fronted by open stable doors. It was loud with hammering and the smell of horses, and the glow of the fire made the rest of the inside inky black. The small cottage home of the Sidleys was attached to one side, with a low door, painted the kind of brown that suggests leftover paint, and a single polished window with a worn curtain on the narrow ground floor. In a window box some marigolds struggled for existence. Beatrice knocked with the iron door knocker and noted that the step was freshly washed and limed.

  “Who is it?” asked a thin voice, and the sound of coughing came slowly to the door.

&nbs
p; “Beatrice Nash, from the grammar school,” said Beatrice. There was some hesitation behind the door and then a slow turning of the lock, as if it were a stiff and heavy task. The door opened a little, and a woman, Snout’s mother, clung to the frame, breathing hard.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t catch my breath too well these days. Won’t you come in?” She did not wait for an answer but turned back into the house, and Beatrice followed her into the narrow parlor. It was smaller than her cottage, one room deep with a narrow scullery across the back. It was dark, and though the hearth was newly blackened and laid, and the rag rug on the boards clean, the room smelled faintly of soot. There were no settees, just a few wooden chairs set around the edge and a wicker chaise by the fire, to which Mrs. Sidley returned.

  “I came to ask you about your son,” said Beatrice, perching on a chair. “They said at school that he enlisted, but he’s far too young, isn’t he?”

  There was silence for a few moments. Mrs. Sidley gazed into the unlit pile of paper and coal as if looking at a puzzle.

  “Could you put a match to the fire?” she asked, at last. “Abigail is working and my husband when he gets into the shoeing, he forgets to come and light it for me.”

  “Of course,” said Beatrice. She took a long match from a brass cup on the mantel and knelt to strike it against the fender.

  “They don’t mean to forget me, you know,” she said. “It’s hard to remember an invalid all the time. I don’t want to be a drag on their hopes.” She coughed blood into a lace handkerchief. Beatrice averted her eyes to give the woman some privacy.

  “Where is your son?” asked Beatrice.

  “I don’t want to be a drag on his hopes neither,” said his mother. “But it was awful hard to let him go. Thought I was like to up and die from the pain in my heart right then when he left.”

  “Did he really enlist?” asked Beatrice.

  “Begged his father for a week to sign the paper,” said Mrs. Sidley. “Said he’d run off and enlist anyways if he said no.”

  “But he needs his schooling,” said Beatrice. “He can do very well.”

  “Said he heard it himself the school had no more use for him,” said the invalid, gazing drowsily at the now licking flame. “Not allowed to sit the Latin Scholarship on account of they still hold his father’s family against him.” She looked at Beatrice and gave her a small smile. “Soon as I saw my husband, I forgot it mattered,” she added. “All that nonsense—I could see nothing in his eyes but how he worshiped me.”

  “Not everyone can— There are many requirements beyond the academic,” said Beatrice, but she blushed to say it and the words stuck in her throat. She hung her head and added, “There are people who do not want to see your son give up on his studies.”

  “Very practical, my children,” said Mrs. Sidley. “Abigail up and tells me blunt like that she don’t want to be stuck home after I’m dead, doing for her father and having no life and no children of her own.” She paused to put the handkerchief to her lips again and take several labored breaths before going on. “Still, she comes home every night and starts in on the cleaning here,” she said. “Never says anything about it—just gets on with it like a good girl.”

  “I live at Mrs. Turber’s house,” said Beatrice.

  “Oh, I know who you are,” said Mrs. Sidley. “My Dickie thinks the world of you, Miss Nash. Says you would’ve stuck up for him more only they don’t have so much use for you either there; so you have to be careful, Dickie says.”

  “Your children are old souls, Mrs. Sidley,” said Beatrice. She felt faint with shame that the boy would make excuses for her own weakness.

  “They come from old blood,” said the invalid. “My father’s family has been farriers and smiths about these parts for generations. And my husband’s family has been coming through this county same time every year for over five hundred years.”

  “That is astonishing, Mrs. Sidley,” said Beatrice, ashamed that she had not thought of Maria Stokes’s people as anything but ephemeral.

  “They got all the stories,” she said. “Course they don’t tell ’em to nobody outside the family.” She paused and then added, “My husband’s grandmother Mrs. Stokes has a Bible three feet tall with all the records penciled in it.”

  “I know Mrs. Stokes,” said Beatrice. Then she hurriedly added, “Mrs. Kent took me to visit her.”

  “Good woman, that Mrs. Kent,” she said. “Often comes by with some of her beef tea for me.”

  “Seeing as you are so sick, I wonder that you let your son go away,” said Beatrice. “Won’t you miss him?” Snout’s mother did not cry, but she seemed to turn a little grayer and worked her dry, wrinkled hands together as if she were weeping. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” added Beatrice. “I just hate to see him leave school.”

  “He is too tender an age to be a soldier,” said his mother.

  “But he made his case, didn’t he?” said a voice, and Beatrice jumped to see the farrier, a man with a face black from the soot of the fire and shoulders thick from a life of hammering and lifting iron, coming in from the scullery with his arm around his son. Snout blushed as he twisted a new army cap in his hand. His uniform was big for his frame and seemed to be tied to him by its belt like a laundry bundle tied with string. “Who’s to naysay his goin’?” said Mr. Sidley.

  “I’m Beatrice Nash,” said Beatrice, standing up to show she was not afraid. “I teach your son Latin?”

  “And ye taught him in the summer,” said Mr. Sidley. His Sussex brogue was much thicker than those of most of the townspeople and pegged him as a country man. His eyes wrinkled in the same manner as Mrs. Stokes’s, and his sharp chin was the image of his son’s. “And he were grateful for it, weren’t you, Son? Though like enough he didn’t say nothing?”

  “He brought me a rabbit once,” said Beatrice. “It made Mrs. Turber scream, but she enjoyed the rabbit stew.”

  “It weren’t nothing,” said Snout, shrugging.

  “You’re a good lad,” said his mother.

  “He’s a lad knows his own business,” said Mr. Sidley. “He came and told me how it is in that school and how much better off he’d be seeing a bit o’ the Continent and learning soldiering.”

  “He’s very bright,” said Beatrice. “He belongs in school.”

  “I was working at eleven, as was my father, and beholden to no man,” said Snout’s father. “So when he come and asked me, I gave him my blessing, my best bone-handled knife, and two gold sovereigns; and I told him to go show the buggers that the Sidleys are as patriotic as any other Englishmen and better than most.” He gave Snout a slap on the back that seemed liable to knock the boy over. Snout’s mother turned her head away, her crumpled handkerchief pressed to her mouth. “Plenty boys his age working and married an’ all,” added the farrier.

  “I thought maybe you had run off without permission, Snout,” said Beatrice. “I see I was wrong, so I’ll not trouble you or your family any further.”

  “If you please, miss, I’m grateful for everything you did for me,” said Snout. “No one ever talked to me like you did, like I was a real person.”

  “I wish you would reconsider,” said Beatrice, her voice urgent. “If you come back, I promise I will fight harder.”

  “I’ll always remember what you did for me, but I’m glad to be a soldier now, not a schoolboy,” said Snout, squaring his shoulders.

  There seemed nothing more to say. She fumbled in her satchel and produced at last her father’s copy of Virgil’s Aeneid.

  “Something of comfort on your long quest,” she said. He bit his lip hard to keep from any display of weakness, but as he took it from her, his voice trembled.

  “Audentis fortuna iuvat, miss.”

  “I pray that fortune does indeed favor you, Snout,” she said. How hard it was to hear the famous quote, spoken by a warrior destined to die, dropped from the lips of this boy in an ill-fitting man’s uniform.

  “We’ll be off to the tra
in, miss,” said the farrier. “He’s due back in camp by supper.”

  As Snout left, his father’s arm again about his shoulders, Beatrice stayed in the doorway to offer her arm to his gently weeping mother.

  “He would’ve run off if we’d said no,” said Mrs. Sidley. She sank against the doorframe, and it was all Beatrice could do to keep her on her feet. “Our hearts are plenty heavy, miss, but at least this way his poor sister and I will get a postcard now and then.”

  The death of Lieutenant Lancelot Chalfont North, Viscount Craigmore, First Battalion, Royal Flying Corps, only son of Earl North, was announced with solemnity in all the newspapers. Since there seemed no reason to single out his titled family amid a steady trickle of aristocratic deaths, and as the death was not part of a major battle or act of heroism, Hugh was left to conclude that the interest lay more in their ability to accompany the news with a dashing photograph of Craigmore in full flying gear and white scarf, waving from the cockpit of his Farman trainer.

  The service in London was to be private and there was a rush to obtain invitations. The saddest of occasions became a social prize and, with the whisper that a member of the royal family might attend, the maneuverings among London hostesses were fierce. Colonel Wheaton and Lady Emily had received an invitation, and Aunt Agatha reported that Mr. Tillingham had written a letter of condolence running to three pages of praise for the youth—in whose company he had spent such a delightful evening as could never fade from the mind—and had been rewarded with a black-edged envelope.

  When Hugh went to tea with Lucy, prepared to apologize again for abandoning her at the dance in Rye, she had been more eager to ask about whether he planned to attend the funeral of his cousin’s good friend and whether she might support him with her presence. He tried to answer in a vague manner. He would have been glad to support his cousin, Daniel, if asked, but he could not tell Lucy that Daniel had not received an invitation.

  “If we need to be officially engaged…” she said, looking demure. From this Hugh understood she would trade much for an invitation.