The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  The Ancre. The village of Authuille. A shaded area above the riverbank. The Daireaux woods. Every single ridge, every shallow in the river, every path and field were clearly depicted. The front line, enemy positions and dressing stations. The line called Speyside Avenue. Symbols and arrows etched in pencil, presumably by Captain Winterfinch before his arm was torn off.

  Position 324. Where they had tried to dig in with the machine guns. Where sixteen walnut trees had grown.

  The war began to recede from the map, and what remained was the terrain. As it had been before the artillery positions, when the walnut trees began to grow in the 1500s, like it was in 1971, when Mamma and Pappa and I had been there.

  Of course I had always known my parents were dead, but where it had happened was only a dot in the atlas. Here I could actually see the place, as clear as an orienteering map. At a small section below the edge of the woods the river curved and spilled out into three large ponds.

  They must have drowned in one of them.

  An unfamiliar realisation spread inside me. A combination of conviction and anticipation, like when I had been driving around with Bestefar’s photograph of Haaf Gruney and watched the terrain gradually fall into place, as though two identical sketches had come into alignment.

  A memory was in bloom.

  And slowly it happened, the map aligned with my memory. A path we had walked along. The smell of the woods. Strange birdsong. Two warm hands holding mine, one larger than the other, Pappa’s. Branches we had to push aside. A sweep of green, a marshy tract. Then nothing.

  Had I run away from them then? Or was I imagining this?

  *

  Gwen had not noticed that I had retreated into my thoughts. She chattered to herself as she searched through the company archives, which in themselves were proof that Winterfinch Ltd had remained faithful to its suppliers: up to 1929, the archivists had used only pale-yellow binders from Stonehill’s, and from then until 1967 they had switched to Eastlight binders with grey marbled spines.

  But for the year 1943 a yellow file stuck out amongst the grey. A Stonehill binder with 1921 on the spine, misplaced by twenty-two years.

  In it she found a contract, written in French, on the old letterhead for Winterfinch Ltd. Suppliers of fine and exotic materials worldwide. Edinburgh – London – Rangoon – Georgetown – Takoradi. The agreement was dated 1921 and concerned the right to cut down “all trees” in the Daireaux woods in Authuille. Next to Duncan Winterfinch’s rigid signature was a name in blue ink, the letters compact – Edouard Daireaux.

  He had been a true farmer, my great-grandfather. For his intention behind the agreement with Winterfinch had not been to make money, but to make the woods viable once more.

  For the right to fell the sixteen walnut trees, Winterfinch was to pay for private sappers to continue where the authorities had left off. All explosives and “recognisable body parts” should be removed from the forest floor, and new trees planted.

  But it was not long before problems arose. And for the two of us standing in Quercus Hall seventy years later, the same disagreement would bubble to the surface. We began to guard our words, and at the same time looked for slips in whatever the other had to say.

  “They were due to receive a generous sum when the trees were felled,” she said. “Presumably enough for your family to build new houses on the farm.”

  “That’s of little help,” I said, “when it’s clear that the contract was never fulfilled.”

  Among the papers was a report from the supervisor of the sappers which stated that three men had died in the course of a few days. The ground was boggy. The equipment was no good. The problems multiplied. When the gunmaker had described how the patterns and colour of the wood were still developing, that was only half the explanation for the delay. Winterfinch never managed to get a work party to clear the woods.

  In fact the work to remove shells went on for years, and even on land where it was possible to use a tractor and plough, hundreds of sappers died. It was not until the thirties that Winterfinch managed to find people who were willing to take the risk, but each team was clearly more ragtag and alcoholic than the next. In the end everyone walked away from the contract. Thickets and bushes had now grown up between the shells, making the undertaking even more hopeless. Winterfinch wrote letters to the Renault factory in the hope that they could speed the development of the new “wonder machine”, an armoured tractor with an iron thresher that set off the detonators without anyone getting injured.

  But by then the war commission had begun to grumble. They protested at the use of rough machinery on a forest floor on and in which there lay the bodies of thousands of British soldiers. Either they should clear the woods by hand, or they would have to leave the mass grave as it was, behind barbed wire.

  We continued our search, went swiftly through the private archive and more slowly through the business files. Here and there we found evidence of Winterfinch’s plans for the sale of the wood: An option contract with Purdey, supplier of hunting weapons to the royal family, for the purchase of thirty blanks for an astronomical sum.

  Until now Gwen had seemed a little ashamed of the treatment my family in France had received; all she seemed to be uncovering were cold calculations about profitability. But then she found a piece of paper which turned everything on its head. It was a letter to the director of Scottish Widows, a bank originally established as a fund for the widows of soldiers who had fallen in the Napoleonic Wars.

  “I assume Scottish Widows still exists,” I said.

  “Of course it does. Their symbol is the same, a widow with a veil, but she’s become a little less sad over the years. Much less sad, in fact.”

  Then she was silent. I leaned over her shoulder to read.

  “Just as I thought,” she said. “He had never meant to keep the profits. Look, he’d established a fund for the surviving family of the soldiers. He wasn’t going to keep a single pound.”

  It was now six o’clock in the morning, but we were determined to keep searching to the bitter end, and when we found the next document of any significance – an instruction from Winterfinch to the clearing team – we felt wretched for each other.

  The years had passed. Winterfinch had been paying the Daireaux family a tiny sum each year to maintain the rights to the walnut trees. It was not until 1938, with new developments in protective gear and metal detectors, that he managed to initiate effective clearing work.

  Winterfinch had stressed in his instructions that only the area around the walnut trees was to be cleared, so that the old paths into the woods would remain perilous until the trees were felled and transported out. The safe areas and access to them should be marked on a map referred to several times in the letter, but which we had not found in the file. The letter closed with Winterfinch’s plan to protect the walnut from illegal felling: Gas shells would be left as a perimeter around the trees and along the shore of the river; in effect it should be mined so that no-one could gain access.

  *

  Gwen stood with the document as though it were a death sentence. She was silent for a long time before placing it back in the folder.

  We left the cold of the basement, passed through the long corridors and reached the warmer entrance, where we were greeted by morning as she slammed shut the door to Quercus Hall.

  “Our agreement is terminated,” she said, marching off towards the stone cottage. “I don’t care what might have happened during the war, or any time since. Obsessions can go from generation to generation. Grandfather spent his entire life casting bitter looks at Haaf Gruney, but this story has nothing to do with us, Edward. Come, let’s sleep. Or at least go to bed.”

  We lay naked as the morning light streamed through the curtains, but I could not sleep. Because my deception was already a fact. As she read the documents, I had taken out the Leica and secretly photographed Duncan Winterfinch’s old military map.

  14

  DAYS OF WARMTH. WE WENT INSIDE HER S
TONE COTTAGE, thick stone walls separating us from the weather. Oak which smelled faintly of honey, a gentle fire as we listened to music. Gwendolyn liked to play music loud, really loud, she liked rebellious bands – The Clash, The Alarm and The Pogues – and she was a completist, bought even obscure maxi singles and bootlegs. I collected the sheep carcass from Haaf Gruney and we seasoned it with thyme and rock salt, locked ourselves in and shared a defiant happiness at our self-sufficiency. Got drunk on White Horse and woke up naked on the sofa.

  From the time we awoke until the time we fell asleep, she seemed genuine. She looked me in the eye, she no longer needed to pause before answering. That was what I must have fallen in love with, the fact that she did not conceal anything and yet remained a mystery. I began to like the way she was different from Hanne, and I knew that it was not fair. Gwen would roll quickly out of bed after being served, as she put it, slip under the shower and then get dressed. Hanne would worm herself under the sheets and talk intensely, tainting beautiful moments with endless chatter or awkward conversations.

  “Listen, dear Edward,” Gwen said, taking my hands in hers. “I like you. Really like you. Even when you’re dressed like a tramp. There are still a few days left of summer. We have a car. There’s a record shop in Lerwick, and an Indian restaurant. What more could a couple wish for?”

  I liked the fact she no longer concealed her ancestry. Her contempt for people who bought clothes on sale. Her irritation that the marina would not send anyone to Unst to carry out a discreet repair job on Zetland, and instead dropped hints of special offers on new fibreglass boats.

  “Horrid people!” she said, and hung up. “They went on about the price, not the quality. It’s barbaric. And it was white, a white, synthetic boat! Ghastly! Like an announcement to the entire world that good old Zetland has been replaced.”

  “People don’t care,” I said.

  “It’s no way to spend old money,” she said. “Grandfather bought a new Bentley every other year. Always dark blue and with the same registration number. Why follow trends when others follow you?”

  She picked up the telephone again and delivered a couple of unambiguous comments to the boss. A couple of boatbuilders came that very same day. When they were finished, we set out on the boat at full throttle, spent hours cruising around the archipelago. Zetland appeared to be her most prized possession, even though it was Italian. Because now that she did not need to pretend, she began to show her full pedigree. Her enthusiasm for objects that had improved with age, for pre-decimal currency, for equipment designed for lengthy safaris, for shrewd plans to outwit Hitler, for actions where Shackleton might have presented an example to follow, or which might excuse Scott’s delay in reaching the South Pole.

  I did not notice until later that I had changed too. One day she stood in the doorway while I got dressed, then went to Quercus Hall and returned with a suitcase. It was packed with neatly folded clothes.

  “No, Gwen,” I said. “Your grandfather’s clothes. They—”

  “—are not his. They belonged to my brother. He got fat and forgot about them.”

  She turned down the volume on the stereo, and Big Country’s The Crossing disappeared. “They’ve been hanging here since the last summer holiday the family had together,” she said, holding a shirt up to the light. “Turnbull & Asser. Same shirtmaker as the one you borrowed for Dickson’s.”

  “Is this Egyptian cotton too?” I said and stroked the small-checked fabric. Soft, and yet firm and tightly woven.

  She shook her head. “Sea Island, 140 threads per inch. Didn’t find an exact match in trousers. But of course you can borrow these.” She dug out a pair of dark-brown trousers. “Cavalry twill, probably an impulse buy. Goes well with a Herringbone jacket.”

  “The tailor has certainly done his bit,” I said.

  “You understand nothing, darling. You can thank the British class divide for everything you now admire. Can you name one noteworthy object that’s handmade in East Germany?”

  “Not offhand, no.”

  “Without a social class with good taste and plenty of money, there would be no Arbus divan. No Purdey shotgun. No Bentley to turn your head. Not even Indian food would be as it is. Everything exists because someone was rich enough and discriminating enough to reward a gunsmith or a saddler or a chef with an outrageous amount of work.”

  I put on the clothes and sat down in front of the fireplace with my feet up on an ottoman. I stared into the flames. Work clothes had always been my retreat – outside all day, dig in, keep going, wear yourself out.

  It pressed in on me, the certainty that this was stolen time. Every sheep on Unst reminded me of the sheep back home. Leaving the fields, the tonnes of precious seed potatoes, it was the most frivolous and potentially negligent thing I had ever done.

  But now, out of the blue, I did not feel like working. I felt like drinking tea, buying records, sitting here in the middle of the day without feeling guilty. Was that how Bestefar had felt in his annual week away, strolling around in a suit tailored by Andreas Schiffer, a concert ticket in his inside pocket?

  *

  We went across to Muckle Flugga, to the lighthouse in the north where the cliffs were battered by a white frothing sea. We strolled up and down the streets of Lerwick, got drunk and checked in at a guest house. Gwen taught me to handle Zetland, I was skipper on fast trips to Fetlar, where we walked through meadows and took in the scent of andromedas, watched how they changed colour when the wind changed. On to Out Skerries, where we sat with binoculars and studied the glistening otters. Soon Zetland became an extension of my own movements, the long row of chrome-bezelled instruments faithfully passing messages between us. Every metre I walked in that tweed jacket took me closer to becoming someone else, but who that someone else was, what type of metal I had in the casting mould, of that I could not be sure.

  For the reminders were everywhere, the towering presence of Quercus Hall, the thought of the dress in the coffin. Still I looked out towards Haaf Gruney, at the ghosts waiting for an answer. It was as though Mamma’s voice was shouting: You must not let it go, you must keep searching to the end.

  What would it be like, my leavetaking of Gwen when I said that I had to head home to look after the farm? What would she be left with when the one sweet thing in her life was expended?

  But I dragged out the time. I began to observe her gestures, to see if she would reveal something more. It began to get out of hand. Every time I let my eyes linger on Quercus Hall, she would give me a sidelong glance, like a sleeping animal who all of a sudden raises an eyelid. We began to sniff out nuances in what the other said, and if we mentioned the word “walnut” we would instantly become Einar Hirifjell and Duncan Winterfinch.

  She was the one who cracked. “I want to go out to Haaf Gruney,” she said one morning. “I’m tired of upholstery. I want cold and wet and stone. Here it’s too . . . much. I don’t like the reminders, and I don’t like seeing your gaze wander.”

  *

  I woke up to her movements, and when our eyes found each other, I knew that she had been watching me. Gwen lay on her side, her head resting on her hand, and held a corner of the sheet up to her throat. Here on Haaf Gruney there was no bathroom, no plush towels. Just a tin bowl, a water pitcher and a paraffin lamp.

  She did not have the spectre of a blue dress. She had escaped her ghosts, but had not grasped how Haaf Gruney brought mine to life.

  “I can’t understand why your grandfather didn’t fell all the trees while the sappers were still there,” I said.

  She looked at me stupidly. “Is that what you’ve been thinking about? They didn’t think that the pattern would have finished developing until 1943. How could Grandfather have known the war would come? Anyway, it’s a job for specialists. Felling trees is easy, but if they’re going to be made into weapons stocks, they have to be sawn up immediately, with rift cuts.”

  “With what?”

  “I did pick up something from seven generation
s of timber traders,” she said in irritation. “It requires a specialist, someone who can study the direction of the grain and make the cut exactly where the pattern comes into its own. I imagine Einar learned how to do it at Ruhlmann’s. He was just the man for the job. Now let’s leave it.”

  We got dressed and went out on Zetland. The weather was calm. There were no storm petrels to be seen. Then I switched on the radio and listened to the weather reports. I could feel the seasons in my body, the instincts of a farmer. If there was bad weather back home, the crop would be destroyed.

  “Listen, Edward,” she said. “We have to replace the broken window and the kitchen could do with a good clean. I may be clumsy, but I should be able to wash the floor. Why don’t you take Zetland over to Yell, to the hardware store?”

  “You want me to take Zetland?”

  “Don’t worry, she’s insured, and the sea will be calm for at least a few hours. I can make the place nice for when you get back. We both need a bit of space, don’t you think?”

  Why not? I thought. I had covered over the coffin containing the dress and the letters; she would never be able to dig through two metres of peat.

  It was so good to be alone on a powerful boat. The tingling in my stomach when I planed it, the propeller’s hold in the sea, the vibrations of the motor running through the wooden hull, the wind whipping my face with drops of salt. The sun sharp over the cliffs of Fetlar and the low hillsides on Yell. The faster I went, the better it felt. But for the fact that I could no longer ignore the passenger sitting behind me, silent and trusting, dressed as best she could, her gaze uncertain.

  Hanne.

  *

  I bought glass and putty and came back to repair the window. Gwen had tidied the pantry and bedroom, cleaned the kitchen and living room. She hadn’t done the best job, truth be told, but she had picked some flowers and put them in a cracked coffee cup.

  That evening we cast our nets. Eight cod the following morning. The sea was dead calm, there was no movement apart from some geese which had flown over to the island from Fetlar, low over the houses, and landed on the north end of Haaf Gruney, where they plucked at the grass.