She was re-reading the unsettling note in her office when Goldie Johanson paid her a visit later that day.
Looking up, she frowned and said impulsively, ‘I’m so worried about Charlie.’
‘What’s he said in that letter?’
‘Nothing, really. That’s what’s wrong. It’s a lot of meaningless words. He’s well. The weather is dull. He says nothing. I’m sure he’s hiding something from me. Oh, if only I could see him!’
‘Won’t they give him convalescent leave yet?’ asked Goldie.
‘No. I asked about that. They say he’s not able to travel but this letter says his wounds have healed and he talks about going for walks along the beach. If he can walk on the beach, surely he can come home.’
‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry for him to get better. As soon as they’re able to carry a rifle, they’re being sent back to France,’ warned Goldie.
‘I know. I’m terrified of that. Oh, what if they send him back without me seeing him?’ She shuddered at the thought that her son might not be so lucky the next time he went to Flanders and her anxiety made her burst out, ‘Oh, Goldie, he’s been away so long. He left the year before the war started. He was just a little boy! When I’m driving along the street, I sometimes catch sight of a young man who reminds me of him and my heart leaps because I think it’s Charlie. I’ve no idea what he looks like now. My own son!’
Goldie’s eyes were sympathetic. ‘This isn’t like you. You’re upsetting yourself. If anyone can fix this, we can. We’ve enough influence between us to organize visits for the parents of a whole regiment. Why don’t you go to Hastings and demand to see him?’
‘I was thinking of it,’ she agreed. Then she fell silent because she felt it would be stupid to tell him that she’d never been out of Scotland. Gourock was the farthest of her travels. Some woman of the world I am, afraid to go to London on my own, she thought!
It was as if he could read her mind. ‘I’m going south next week. I’m sailing down in one of my own ships. You can travel with me if you like,’ he offered.
She did not hesitate a moment before accepting.
* * *
Goldie’s ship had an owner’s suite of two magnificent staterooms with adjacent bathrooms. They were sumptuously furnished with deep-buttoned sofas, luxurious beds and louvred wooden shutters that closed across brass-bound portholes. Everything sparkled and shone, even the decks gleamed.
When Lizzie boarded the ship and saw the cabin that had been assigned to her, she clasped her hands in delight. Ahead of her stretched three whole days away from the world, away from letters, newspapers and the din of her mill. She’d not had so many days off for years. It never struck her that it was highly unconventional to travel with Goldie without a chaperon, for she was so used to him as a business associate and friend that the question of propriety never arose.
He was standing by her side, intently watching her face as she looked around.
‘Do you like it?’ he asked like a little boy presenting a gift.
‘Like it! I love it. I’ve never seen anything so luxurious. You really treat yourself well, don’t you, Mr Johanson?’
He chuckled, shrugging his broad shoulders. ‘Why not? Life’s for living, I always say.’
She was surprised. That was her father’s philosophy, but not something she had ever consciously considered for. She’d been too busy working. I’ll enjoy this trip, she promised herself.
Goldie warned her that they might be in danger from enemy ships which were blockading the British coast but they never saw anything to cause them disquiet.
The weather was kind too for there was a spell of warm sunshine that sometimes comes with early spring. The sailing was smooth, every day the sea was like glass. On the second morning she and Goldie sat companionably together on the deck in long white-painted chairs and he persuaded her to sip champagne.
‘Forget your troubles for a bit. You’re far too solemn about everything,’ he told her.
They didn’t talk much. She closed her eyes and drifted in and out of sleep, only waking to eat another meal or stand at the deck rail watching the distant coast slip by. Goldie pointed out landmarks to her, naming places that she’d heard of in school geography lessons – Newcastle on Tyne, the Hull estuary, the coast of the Fens. She strained her eyes and gazed where he pointed, delighted with this interlude in her life.
On their last afternoon, as they were steaming up the Thames towards Wapping Stairs, the sun was brilliant and the heat so reassuring that she loosened the high, tight neck of her blouse and took out the long pins that skewered her thick rope of hair to the top of her head. It fell around her shoulders in a thick curtain and when she pushed it back, she noticed a strange look on Goldie’s face. Before she could make out what he was thinking, he deliberately lifted his newspaper and hid himself behind it.
Goldie’s agent at Wapping was a woman. She was waiting on the quay for his ship to tie up and rushed towards him, hands extended and a bright beam on her red-cheeked face. Neither of them were small and they collided like a pair of tug boats as the woman kissed Goldie on the cheek and slapped his back, crying, ‘Good to see you again, old fellow. You’re looking good, an’t you?’
She spoke with a strange accent that Lizzie found difficult to follow at first. Later she was to hear all the dockers and cab men talking the same way and realized she was listening to pure Cockney.
The agent was introduced as Elizabeth Austen.
‘You two should like each other,’ Goldie told Mrs Austen. ‘You’re both formidable women. Lizzie Kinge here’s a mill owner and a thorn in the flesh of the mill-men in Dundee…’
To Lizzie he said, ‘Meet my friend Mrs Austen, the only woman shipping agent in London. You should hear her swear. No longshoreman has a better vocabulary.’
Mrs Austen slapped his shoulder again and cackled, ‘You’re an old bugger, an’t you, Goldie?’ And to Lizzie she said, ‘Glad to meet you, ducks. Any friend of Goldie’s a friend of mine. Know what I mean?’ And she crinkled up her face in a huge, meaningful wink.
Lizzie’s sense of propriety was shaken but she couldn’t help liking the woman, who smelt of lavender water mixed with brandy and whose clothes were very fine in spite of the fact that she was working on a dockside. Her dress was of expensive striped silk with large puffed sleeves and she wore a rakishly tipped straw boater decorated at the back with three silk cabbage roses. In this get-up she was a very impressive sight standing among her crew of dockers, who were stripped to the waist and glistening with sweat.
‘I’ve got a great cargo for you this time,’ she told Goldie with a nudge.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Gold bars.’
‘Come off it, don’t joke. What is it?’
‘I’m serious, gold bars. The Government’s sending them to Scotland to be stored in a safe place. Even I don’t know where they’ll end up but I’ve to send them to Leith. They’ve to go at once. Can your ship turn round today?’
Goldie looked unsure. ‘The ship could. It’s only carrying baled sacking. It could be unloaded by midnight, but Mrs Kinge’s going to Hastings and she needs a few days in the south before she goes back.’
‘God luv us, she can wait for the next trip north, can’t she? It’ll be back in a week, won’t it?’ said Mrs Austen.
Goldie looked at Lizzie and for the first time she realized that the trip south had been undertaken solely on her behalf. He didn’t really have any business in London at all.
‘Of course you must take the gold north,’ she told him. ‘I’ll manage perfectly well on my own.’
‘They can sail without me,’ Goldie told her. ‘I’ll escort you anywhere you want – if you’d like me to, that is. But do you want to spend a week down here?’
‘There’s not much point coming all this way if I’m going to turn round and go straight back,’ said Lizzie.
* * *
They took a hackney cab into Mayfair and alighted at th
e portico of the Ritz Hotel. It was evening by the time they arrived, and the lights along Piccadilly were only tiny flickers like glow-worms, because of the black-out. Goldie kept saying, ‘I wish you could see London as it used to be, a magnificent sight…’
‘I’ll see it all in daylight tomorrow. Don’t worry. Anyway I didn’t come down to go sight-seeing.’
The hotel was furnished in much the same style as she remembered Goldie’s home in Broughty Ferry, with gilt chairs and masses of potted plants. A few elegantly dressed women and some officers in khaki were sitting in the foyer, sipping drinks and talking.
The hotel porters knew Goldie and bustled about showing them into two suites which proved to be as sumptuous as the accommodation on his ship. When the last of the porters went away, Lizzie looked at her escort in admiration and asked, ‘Do you always live like this?’
‘When I can,’ he said, and laughed infectiously.
They dined in a crowded dining room. They drank champagne and he touched the edge of her glass with his as he said, ‘Here’s to Charlie. Tomorrow you’re setting out to find him, aren’t you?’
She nodded, solemnity returning. ‘How far is it to Hastings?’
‘About two hours on a train. Do you want to go alone?’
‘Yes, I think so. I hope you don’t mind. You’ve organized this for me and I know that you didn’t need to come to London at all – but I’d like to see Charlie on my own.’
He nodded. ‘Of course. I’ll tell the hotel to reserve the suite for you indefinitely. Just come back when you’re ready.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I can always find something to do in London, and if you’re not back in a couple of days I’ll go home. Mrs Austen will help you fix up a passage back to Dundee. I’ll leave her address. All you need do is send her a message.’
She nodded but she was not ready to think so far ahead. Her mind was concentrated on finding Charlie.
Next morning Goldie saw her on to the train for Hastings and stood waving on the platform as her train drew away.
* * *
The cab driver at Hastings station looked sympathetically at her when she told him that her son was a patient in the hospital for wounded soldiers.
‘Which one?’ he asked, eyeing her expensive clothes. ‘He’s an officer, is he?’
‘No, he’s a corporal. He was wounded at the Somme.’
The man nodded. ‘A squaddie. Is he in the surgical hospital or the loony bin? I mean the asylum…’
She looked put out. ‘He was shot through the chest. He’s in the surgical hospital, of course.’
‘This town’s full of those poor devils,’ said the cabbie. ‘As soon as they have them walking again, they’re back on the boats to France. Makes you sad it does to see them.’
Lizzie did not want to talk and sat with her back stiff against the high seat staring out at the town as they drove through it. Hastings was a drab town with nothing to recommend it as far as she could see. Streets of little houses straggled up a hill towards a large bleak building where eventually the cab horse came to a stop at a pillared doorway.
‘We’re here, mum,’ called the cabbie. ‘Do you want me to wait?’
‘Yes, for a little till I make sure this is where he is,’ said Lizzie as she stepped down.
In the hospital office there was no Charles Kinge on the patient list. ‘But I know he’s in Hastings. He was shot in the chest in July and brought here at the beginning of August. Please look again,’ she pleaded.
A brisk young woman in a VAD’s stiffly starched uniform checked again and eventually found Charlie’s name. ‘Oh, yes, he was here. They sent him over the hill to the other hospital. It’s called Spring Hill. You’d better try there, Mrs Kinge.’
When the cabbie heard that Lizzie wanted to go to Spring Hill, he nodded in a knowing way but only said, ‘Lots of them end up there. Can’t blame them really.’
Spring Hill was badly named because it was a hideously institutional building of red and yellow bricks with an immense chimney rising at the back. If it hadn’t been for the gardens, it might have been a jute mill. With a chill in her heart Lizzie saw that the upper windows were barred. A man greeted her in the hall. He wore a white coat and had a stethoscope round his neck.
She asked if there was a Charles Kinge in the hospital and the man immediately nodded. ‘Yes, he’s here.’
‘I’m his mother.’
The doctor looked doubtful. ‘Were you sent for, Mrs Kinge?’
‘No, I came because I want to see my son.’
‘Visiting’s not really allowed for certain cases. Charlie’s very depressed. I’ll have to find out if it’s suitable.’
Lizzie flashed her green stare at him. ‘My dear man, I’ve come all the way from Dundee to see my son and I won’t go away until I do. Take me to him, please.’
For weeks and months she had wondered what Charlie looked like now that he was grown up and had been matured by war. Before he went to Canada he had favoured her side of the family, with the same build and colouring but with Sam’s great nose and clefted chin. He was always very cheeky-looking – a cocky little lad, people used to call him.
In fact she walked straight past him. Surely that person sitting alone in a basket chair in a long glass-roofed room was not her gregarious Charlie.
He looked up as she swept by, however, and said in an astonished voice, ‘Mother! What are you doing here?’
She turned, pivoting on her parasol, and stared at the speaker. Charlie was very thin and his face was grey but the worst thing about him was his eyes – haunted eyes. He looked to her like a terrified man.
Oblivious of the stares of other patients, she ran towards him and knelt to embrace him. ‘Oh, Charlie, what’s happened to you? What’s wrong?’ She gently stroked his hair back from his temples and looked into his face. He seemed far older than his nineteen years. He looked like a man who had come through hell.
The doctor was behind her, attempting to pull her to her feet. ‘Youir son’s suffering from shell shock, Mrs Kinge. Don’t make too much of a fuss or you’ll upset him. He’s improving very much.’
‘Is this improving?’ she asked, sweeping her arm towards Charlie. ‘He looks awful. What’s happened to him?’
‘We do our best,’ said the doctor in a hopeless sort of way. ‘If you want to speak to him privately, I’ll let you use my office.’
Once they were alone, to her relief Charlie started to talk.
‘They think I’m shamming. They think I’m just dodging going back, but that’s not true. I want to go back. I should have died there like all the others. I want to go back. It’s like desertion to leave them.’
His eyes were full of horror and she held his hands in hers, all her love and pity flowing out to him. She willed her own strength into her son’s body. ‘I’ll stay with you for a while, Charlie,’ she told him.
She stayed in Hastings for three days and spent every hour she could in the hospital. They walked together in the grounds and Charlie was able to clear his mind of some of the spectres that had stalked it since he was brought back on a stretcher from France.
He talked of friends being killed in front of him, he talked of the graveyard humour of the trenches, he talked about William Pennie and Roaring Wind. He told her about how they all shook hands before his friends were killed.
‘I should be dead too,’ he said again and again. ‘I should have died out there. I don’t know why I didn’t. A rat in the shell hole thought I’d died. It started to eat my ear. Maybe I am dead, Mother. Maybe this is hell.’
She tried to console him but he kept saying, ‘I’m a traitor. All my friends are dead. I should be dead as well.’
In anguish she tried to steer him away from this obsession. When she talked of Maggy or Lexie, he listened for a little while but always his mind returned to the trenches.
By the fourth day she had made up her mind that Charlie needed more help than she or the hospital was able to
provide.
‘What’s likely to happen to my son?’ she asked his doctor.
The man looked hopeless. ‘Some of them recover. They rest for a bit, their wounds heal, their minds heal too. Then we send them back.’
‘Only some?’
‘Others break down completely. But your son’s not in that category, I think. He’ll recover if he’s given time.’
‘You don’t think he’s pretending, do you?’
‘No, I don’t. He’s just terribly shocked. It’s the boys who’ve led easy lives before who react worst. They can’t believe it, really. But they come to their senses in the end.’ It was a bleak prescription.
‘And when he is better?’ she asked.
‘Then he returns to the front. He says he wants to go back now, but of course that can’t happen yet. In the shape he is at the moment, he’d be very bad for morale. He has to stay here till he’s better, only time is going to cure him.’
She returned to London and went straight to Harley Street. Eventually, after knocking at door after door, she found a doctor who specialized in cases of shell shock. He listened to her story and nodded when she mentioned Spring Hill.
‘I know it,’ he said.
‘I want someone else to have a look at my son. I don’t care how much it costs. I want you to go down to Hastings and look at my son.’
The grey-haired doctor was grim. ‘You realize that if your son recovers he’ll go back to the fighting, Mrs Kinge? Do you want that for him? Perhaps he’s safer where he is.’
She nodded. ‘I’ve thought about that, but he’s enduring such suffering. He’s so unlike himself. If you could only realize the agony he’s going through. I’m afraid that if he’s left fighting this on his own, he might do something dreadful – kill himself, I mean.’
‘It’s a difficult situation,’ said the doctor.
‘I want you to help him. This war can’t last for ever and my son’s only nineteen. With luck he has a whole life in front of him,’ said Lizzie.
Mistress of Green Tree Mill Page 28