A Life Eternal

by Richard Ayre

  A few days beforehand, my men and I had been loaded onto an old tug in Boulogne and, after a short journey across choppy waters, had disembarked at Folkstone, where a train waited to take us to London.

  The soon-to-be ex-soldiers, still carrying filthy packs and wearing their ragged uniforms, had stumbled onto the platform to be greeted by flags and trestle tables and old ladies who poured us mugs of tea and gave us sausage rolls. We marched through the streets in watery sunshine, past crowds who cheered us, to a town hall where our uniforms were taken from us to be replaced by trousers, shirts and coats.

  When we emerged the rain had started, the crowds had dispersed, and we were civilians once again.

  I watched as war comrades bade each other farewell. Nobody spoke to me; it was as if they knew there was something wrong with me. I wandered around the corner and found a pub, where I bought a pint of ale and stared into the mirror behind the bar.

  I saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with sandy hair and blue eyes. Young in years, yet strangely old. The face that looked back at me seemed too mature for someone only twenty-two.

  The war had done it. It had aged me in strange ways: given me a guarded, enigmatic aspect, an inner reticence. I looked like a man with secrets and, glancing around the bar, I could easily spot the men who had been to war and those who hadn’t, for the veterans had the same look about them. They caught my glance and nodded solemnly back at me. They could see it in me, too.

  I caught a train to sooty old Newcastle, where I found a landlady who took me in for the night. The next day I caught another service further north to Morpeth, a small market town in South East Northumberland. By the time I got to Rothbury, Mu and her family were dead and buried.

  It was the grippe. I had seen it in the trenches over the last few months. It had swept through the filth, striking men down in swathes: although at the beginning some of them had recovered after a few days. I had not succumbed, but many had. They were not calling it grippe now, however, for it had changed and it was deadly. It had a new name: Spanish flu.

  It was early December and the flu had already killed more people around the world in four months than the war had managed in four years. Of course nobody knew that at the time as the wartime censors were still keeping a lid on reality. Only triumphant news was allowed.

  Almost a quarter-of-a-million people were dead or dying from it in Britain alone. My sister and her family were just three more statistics to add to the legions killed from conflict and disease.

  I had loved my sister dearly, but I didn’t weep for her at her graveside. I couldn’t. At the time I believed this was because I was immured by my experiences in the trenches, that I could not reach inside myself and let the grief out because of the war. That I was simply a burned-out, used-up shell of a man. All this was true. But later in my life I discovered another reason for my stoicism.

  What was the point of it all? I had fought for four-and-a-half years in a war that had done nothing except kill and maim millions of innocents. There were no victors, whatever the newspapers trumpeted. Instead the population of Europe had simply been reduced, randomly and horrifically, to become nothing more than a continent of shattered survivors. Instead of anguish, I just felt a cold, stony anger, a sense of unfairness. The belief that nothing—nothing—I or anyone else did made any difference to anything. The deaths of the last of my blood kin left me as I’d been for years: morose.

  I eventually went back to the cottage where my sister had lived and found it already occupied by new tenants, just like my parents’ house. The ragged people in those poor dwellings stared at me suspiciously until I moved on. They too had probably lost more than they could comprehend in the war. Like everyone from all of the countries that had fought, they were stained and defeated by conflict.

  I didn’t go to the house of Sally Robson, the girl I had spoken of with Captain Greene. I had no wish to find out what had become of her. In all honesty, I didn’t care.

  I wandered around my home village for the rest of that day, past the shops on the small high street still only half-full of victuals. I sat in the pub for a while, nursing a beer. One or two people recognised me, but they kept their distance. They looked upon me with distaste; they had probably lost sons or brothers or fathers and begrudged my survival.

  Eventually, I went down to the river and sat on a bench in the rain, watching the water flow by.

  What would I do now?

  I had nothing. I had left Rothbury as an immature boy and my adult life had consisted of nothing but battle and fear and noise and filth. The war had changed me and shaped me, forged me into something no longer suited for civilian life. But I needed to do something; anything. I needed a job, and I needed time to come to terms with my survival.

  For the first time in my life, I was alone. Before the war I’d had my family, and during the war I’d had my comrades in arms, at least up until the Somme. But now my family was gone, and the men I’d shared the trenches with wouldn’t give me the time of day: they knew there was something wrong with me.

  The rain turned to sleet and, as night fell, I made my way to the railway station and caught the last train back to Newcastle. I had a little money in my pockets and spent a chunk of it on a cheap room near the railway station.

  Sat on the edge of a hard bed in the cold, bare room, I pulled out the letter Captain Greene had given me back in Belgium. He had said a job awaited me if I wanted it.

  My family were gone, and I was homeless and almost penniless. It seemed I had little choice.

  I dreamed that night, as I sometimes still do, of the Medic. That’s how I thought of him, whenever I thought of him at all: the Medic.

  *

  He had black hair and dark eyes. His nose had been broken at some point in the past and he had a ragged scar on his right cheek. He was aged about thirty.

  In my dreams he wandered slowly down the ranks of shredded meat that had once been men. Staring, staring.

  The three bullets that had torn into me had ruptured my lungs. The bullets had gone through me but had caused massive damage, and there was little hope of me surviving the night. I had been found and collected by medics on that body-strewn battlefield and they had dumped me onto a hand-pulled cart along with several other men with wounds equal to or worse than mine. One of the men who slumped opposite me on the rickety, bouncing cart stared at me for the whole journey, grinning at me horribly. It was only when a fly landed on his eye that I realised he had been dead the whole time and his grin was the rictus grimace of death.

  The cart was unloaded at a field hospital, where I was bandaged and then left to die on a stretcher on the grass, while the men who had a chance of surviving were treated first. As the light began to fade, a man walked through the dead and dying and knelt beside me.

  He muttered something to me in French, a question I think, and then sighed. He was a young, blonde man. He looked very tired and his white shirt was black with stiff, dried blood.

  I could not answer him, even if I had understood what he had said. My breath bubbled in my chest. I felt as if I were drowning. Drowning on dry land. My burst lungs were filling with blood and the pain of those breaths was abominable. But I clung tenaciously, frantically, to life.

  The next thing I remember was being placed into a low bed in a hospital ward. The ward was inside a church and French nuns were administering pain relief in the form of soup and prayers.

  It was obviously just somewhere they had found to let the dying expire quietly, providing them with the illusion that they were actually being treated for their injuries. It stank like a butcher’s shop. The whole place was lit by candles and gas lamps, while Jesus glared down at me from his cross high above. I stared at the wooden figure and felt his suffering. I knew I would die in that church. I knew I would not see another morning.

  A low moaning sound was rising and falling around me like an aural tide as the hideously ruptured men breathed their last in the gloom. Some of them whimpered pathetically,
some of them hissed as they stoically kept their enormous pain to themselves. Some of them wept and screamed and called out for their mothers as they felt the cold fingers of eternity touch them. They were boys. Just boys.

  I couldn’t make a sound, even though pain thumped throughout me, keeping time with my weakening heartbeat.

  And in the middle of the night, ignored by the nuns and unseen by most of the patients—they were by now almost all dead—the Medic came to me.

  I couldn’t move by then. My blood had seeped through the useless bandages and into the thin mattress beneath me and the pain was, thankfully but ominously, lessening.

  I was suddenly aware of his presence as he leant over me. I stared up at him, my face no doubt ashen. I was icy cold, yet perversely hot. My head felt as if it were going to burst and my body seemed to be disappearing into the sodden mattress. I was sinking fast and could feel almost nothing. Only that hot ice and the thumping in my brain.

  His candlelit face hovered in the blackness above me, his dark eyes stared down at me.

  He placed a hand on my chest.

  He was smiling.

  *

  I woke with a start, panting, the dream fading but the memory of those black, smiling eyes still there in my vision.

  I sat and wiped a hand across my brow and let out a long, wavering sigh, slowly getting my breath back.

  At last I stood and moved over to the small washbasin in the corner of the room, cupping the cold water over my face and head. I looked at myself in the mirror.

  I still wore my trousers, but I had stripped off my jacket and shirt before falling asleep the night before. I stared at the three small scars on my chest. They were puckered, white. I knew there were similar, slightly larger, marks on my back where the Maxim had spat its bullets through me. They had torn away huge chunks of muscle and bone and ribs as well as decimating my lungs, and yet all that remained were those small scars. My breathing was untroubled, I felt no pain. Not for the first time since that July morning two years before, I wondered how I had healed so quickly and so completely.

  I stood there for a while longer, hands either side of the bowl, then I pushed the thoughts away and shaved. I dressed, went down to my poor breakfast, paid my bill, and walked to the train station.

  My rapidly decreasing funds bought me a ticket back to London, where I spent a lonely Christmas day. From there I caught a service to Winchester. The place I wanted was called Longwood Manor, just outside Owelsbury, wherever that was. I had no income, no prospects, and no future. My family was gone and so was my career in the army. I had little choice but to see if my erstwhile captain had told the truth.

  I would go and work for Jonathon Greene.

  III

  The years I spent as Greene’s gamekeeper were some of the best of my life. Not the happiest by any means, but some of the best. Upon finding Longwood and introducing myself, I was shown into a huge library by a servant: an old retainer named Brewis, who looked like he’d been part of the household for decades. I mooched idly around the room as I waited for Brewis to get Greene, glancing at the books lining the walls. A lot of them were written in a language I didn’t understand (I later found out it was Latin), and there were leather chairs either side of a warming fire.

  I stood before the bay windows and looked out onto a rather overgrown but very substantial lawn, with a forest beyond it. Rain had started again, spitting in a desultory manner against the panes. It was very quiet. I paced the room as a log cracked and shifted in the fireplace.

  An ancient dog wandered into the room, wagged its tail at me, and allowed itself to be petted for a minute or two before wandering out again. A clock in the hallway outside chimed a resonant note. I stood, staring down into the fire, thinking of my sister.

  ‘Rob!’ shouted a happy-sounding voice behind me, and I automatically whirled and drew myself to attention. Greene chuckled.

  He was dressed in expensive-looking, perfectly creased trousers, but his shirt was crumpled and oily and his sleeves were rolled-up exposing equally oily arms. He strode across the room, extending his dirty hand towards me.

  ‘At ease, Sergeant.’

  Another chuckle.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Rob. Good to see you.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Thank you, sir. You too.’

  It was now early January 1919. Only a couple of months since Greene and myself had talked in that Belgian village, but already a lifetime away. I could see he had changed.

  He had grown a little more padding around his frame, although he was still quite spare. But this was not the real change. He now seemed much more at ease with himself, as if being back in his house had rejuvenated him, made him whole again, and had started to erase the thin, tension-filled individual he had been in the trenches. He seemed better.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ he urged and gestured at one of the chairs. He sat in the one opposite and grinned at me.

  ‘So, I’m hoping the reason you’re here is to take up my offer?’

  I nodded.

  ‘If it’s still available, sir. I’d be very grateful.’

  Greene waved this away.

  ‘Of course it is. I wouldn’t have offered you the post if I hadn’t meant it. I take it you went home to see your family. They’re well?’

  He must have seen the sudden look in my eyes, because he leaned forward, his dirty arms on his knees.

  ‘They are well, aren’t they?’ he asked, concerned.

  I told him what had happened to my sister and her family and he sighed in sympathy. He rang a bell and when the butler came in he ordered a couple of whiskeys. Before long the warming glow of the liquor was in my stomach.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Rob,’ Greene said. ‘I’ve heard about the Spanish flu. Deadly stuff. Awful.’

  His gaze turned to the fire and he suddenly looked once more like the haunted young man I’d known in the trenches.

  ‘I sometimes wonder what else God has in store for us,’ he murmured, almost to himself. ‘I sometimes think the war was such an abomination that He has decided humanity must just go. Disappear. What must He think of us?’

  He turned to me, looking for answers I was in no position to provide.

  ‘One goes through all that,’ he continued. ‘One does one’s duty. One survives. Then innocents like your family are taken away because of a disease.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry, Rob,’ he repeated.

  I swallowed another mouthful of the whiskey to cover the prickling in my eyes. At the graves of my family I hadn’t been able to shed any tears, yet sitting here, with a man who knew what I had been through, what I had experienced, they now seemed to want to flow.

  I blinked them back and simply said; ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Greene contemplated me for a second longer.

  ‘Do you know anything about oil burners?’ he suddenly asked.

  He showed me his hands.

  ‘The bloody boiler has been playing up. I’ve been whacking it about the head and neck with a spanner but it hasn’t seemed to have worked.’

  So we went down to the cellar and, within an hour, I got the boiler working.

  Greene was ecstatic.

  ‘Oh, good show!’ he cried. ‘Oh, jolly well done! I knew I was right to offer you the job. This bloody thing has been the bane of my life since I got back.’

  He stuck out his dirty hand again and I gripped it with my own.

  ‘Welcome to Longwood,’ he said.

  *

  I soon settled into the routine of working for Jonathon Greene. To my amazement and pleasure, the job came complete with a gateman’s cottage. My very own house. It was a small, stone-built affair, with a simple open fire in the kitchen / sitting area, a separate bedroom and an outside privy. The privy even had a flushing toilet! It was heaven.

  My job evolved over the years into a sort of gardener-cum-handyman role, as well as the responsibilities of a gamekeeper, and it was a role I cherished. Whilst at Longwood, I believe I
started to live again, started thinking about my future and enjoying my present. It was as if my blasted soul, battered by the horrors and deprivations of the war, began to wake up and started to learn how to smile again. The work was hard but it kept me in shape and I had my little cottage to sit in at night by the fire.

  One of the Labradors at the Big House had a batch of puppies and I chose a stout male to train. I named him Hector. During the day he would come with me on my rounds and at night he would lie beside me in front of the fire and listen to my stories. Every now and then Greene would visit, often arriving in the dead of night, clutching a bottle of some sort under his arm and grinning conspiratorially. On those nights, Hector would hear more stories and memories shared. He would hear the laughter of friends. As I have said, those years were good.

  But they didn’t last. Nothing ever does. It was on my twenty-sixth birthday when things changed forever. Sixth of August, 1922.

  The night-time visits from Greene had begun to lessen over the last year-and-a-half, and I was more than aware that the reason for this was because of the appearance of a certain Miss Jane Godley.

  She was a beauty, I’ll give her that. Small and slim with huge, baby blue eyes and golden hair. She was the daughter of a local businessman and, although I obviously never said anything, I guessed that her wealthy background was as big a pull for Greene as her appearance.

  Like all the landed gentry in those days, Greene was seeing a huge adjustment in his fortunes. The war had changed a lot of things, not least the balance of power in the country. Commerce and trade had replaced title, and Longwood was expensive to run. Jane Godley must have seemed like manna from heaven for my captain and employer.

  She didn’t like me. That was made clear from the first time we met. One evening, in early June of that year, I was finishing my rounds, and the sun was setting as Hector and I made our way back towards the cottage.