by Peter Rimmer
When he left the club he was a little drunk. It had had nothing to do with the club rules. Or the war. He needed someone to drink with. He was lonely.
The taxi, when it came, had to stop quickly as Jack lurched off the pavement into the road. It was seven o’clock in the evening. After three stiff pink gins with Jim the barman, the usual five o’clock old soaks had come into the club. By then Jack was drunk enough to greet them as old friends. In the middle stages of getting drunk, everyone was his friend.
When Fay opened the door it was the first time she had seen him drunk.
“The army wouldn’t have me, Fay,” he said like a small boy.
“You poor darling. Come in. Your Fay will have you. Your Fay will always have you. I’ll make you some supper. We don’t have to go out. I’ll make us a nice fluffy omelette.”
When she came back from the kitchen with the cooked omelettes he was sound asleep in the armchair. She thought of waking him and then sat down and ate both omelettes. When she went to bed much later she left him in the chair. He was too heavy to lift.
When she woke in the morning he was gone.
At lunchtime, there was a knock on the door and she flew to open it. Outside was an old man with an armful of flowers. He said he was from the local florist. And no, there was no note.
‘Men,’ she said to herself, ‘have a strange way of apologising.’ She gave the old man half a crown for his troubles, which was far too much. But an apology was an apology. The flowers flowed into three vases. When she finished her arrangements she was perfectly content. There were advantages in having an old man as a lover, she told herself. They may not make love so often but they were too old to go to war. She didn’t have to worry about her Jack getting himself blown to pieces.
Not being a man to take no for an answer, Jack had got on the phone. One of his friends from school had joined the regular army and had been sent to South Africa. He had led a small unit of colonials around the bush chasing Boers for nearly two years. Wounded twice, the army had given him a Queen’s South Africa Medal. At the end of the Anglo-Boer War, Jeremy Flagstaff came back to England a hero. When war broke out with Germany, the medal on his tunic stood out. When Jack’s phone call caught up with him at Aldershot, he was the youngest captain in the British Army, which at thirty-four didn’t say much for the peacetime army. Jack told him of his rejection, but not the three cheers for the toff.
“And I don’t want a staff job. Or be a clerk in a uniform. How do I get a military training, Jeremy? I want to fight this war and not be a spectator. For once I have something important to me.”
“Go back to St Paul’s and apply through the CCF. They’ll send you to an officer cadet training unit. I can probably wangle you a posting to Aldershot. We’re the largest OCTU in the country. St Paul’s will lie for you about your age. Get yourself fit, Jack. Don’t walk around the park, run. Do physical exercises.”
“I’m prematurely grey.”
“Then dye your bloody hair. Good luck. You’ll make a good officer, Jack. That much I do know. You’ll feel like mincemeat at the end of the officer training course, but you’ll also feel ten years younger. I probably won’t be here. I’m going to France next week. I can’t wait to see some action again. Peacetime soldiering is a bore.”
The huts were roofed with tin and had been built during the Crimean War. The heat in summer was intolerable. The parade ground at Aldershot was hard, dusty and large, the days the longest Jack had ever known. The pain was more than his worst imagination. He could have run around every park in London every day, done ‘physical jokes’ till his head spun. He could have been eighteen years old. Nothing, nothing, he told his tortured mind and body, could have prepared him for the three-month officer cadet training course at Aldershot barracks. They were shouted at from the moment they woke. They ran everywhere. They spent hours at a time on the parade ground, until they wheeled and turned like puppets on the sergeant major’s string. They were run through gyms, vaulted over horses, sent up ropes, swung their arms from rafters and verbally abused for twenty-four hours every day, seven days a week, with Sunday’s only pleasure a visit to the church for church parade where their buttons and boots shone from their own spit and polish. The worst for Jack was the four hours’ sleep.
Slowly his body went from a sea of pain to something close to feeling strong. But lack of sleep was Jack’s torture. Not the map-reading; machine gun drill; stripping the guns; putting them back together; firing them, running like hell in between; the lectures; the desperate need to concentrate. All Jack wanted to do as the days went on and on into one long nightmare, was sleep. Four hours a day. It was torture. His previous life, all of it, had vanished from his mind.
When Jack passed out as an acting second lieutenant, in front of some major general he was never again to see in his life, Fay would not have recognised her lover. The eyes, dulled from good food and good wine, were alive and bright. His hair was cut so short it had not been necessary to hide his grey hairs. The pip on either shoulder denoting his new rank was the greatest achievement in his life. Out of a course of one hundred and thirty-seven men, Jack was fifteenth in the class. Most of the men were ten or more years his junior. Best of all, he had made more good friends in three months than in the previous years of his life. And his old schoolfriend Jeremy Flagstaff had been right: he felt and looked ten years younger.
On the noticeboard at the drinks party to celebrate their new commissions were their postings. All of them had been given seven days’ leave. Jack had been posted to the East Surrey Regiment, somewhere in Belgium. In a week’s time, he would be told exactly where he was to go.
From Aldershot, Jack took the train up to London. Instead of going home he went straight to Paddington. They had not seen each other since the night he had fallen asleep in the chair. His solicitor took care of the bills. As required by regimental standing orders, Jack was in uniform, the same shabby uniform he had worn as an officer cadet, with the rank and badge insignia changed. He was looking forward to visiting his tailor. Then he would appear in full rig, keeping his battledress for the rigours of war. He thought he deserved something for all the pain they had inflicted on his body.
Only when he rang the doorbell to Fay’s small flat did he realise he had not been bored once in all the three months. Not having any time to waste, he took his mistress straight to bed. She was prettier than he had ever imagined.
“Oh, Jack, what have you been doing?” she screamed with pleasure.
They spent the whole week together, not even going out to a restaurant. Jack had his cook from Baker Street bring over the food and leave it in the kitchen, having cleaned up the mess from the previous day. They both called at his tailor for his new uniform, holding hands all the way in the taxi. Everywhere they looked men were in uniform. The Union Jacks of summer were nowhere to be seen. Once they went to a music hall at the Windmill Theatre, the day Jack walked down Savile Row in his going out uniform, his number one. In addition, he had had a monkey jacket made for the formal mess evenings, the equivalent of civilian evening dress. He looked like a new pin, brushed and scrubbed. Jack smiled at everyone to hide the turmoil building in his stomach as the week reached its conclusion. Then he was at Paddington station, full of soldiers, and saluted. The engine belched white smoke under the great canopy of the railway station and he was waving her goodbye.
Fay went back to the flat and the mess in the kitchen she would have to clean up herself. She couldn’t imagine the snooty cook bringing her anything. He had gone.
Under the high double bed with the side drapes down to the floor was the old trunk from another life. It was all she had left of her family. All the things that had belonged to her mother. She pulled out the wooden trunk with the old iron hoops and studs and brought it through to the sitting room. Fay was frightened of the trunk. With the big iron key she had hidden beneath her clothes in the cupboard she turned the old lock and heard it snap open. Then she lifted up the heavy lid and looked insid
e, picking up some of the pieces and dropping them back into the trunk, conjuring the picture of her mother into her mind. For a long ten minutes, she knelt beside the open trunk with her eyes closed. When she opened them, her small, dark eyes were looking inwards. Her sharp almost beaked nose was thinner than usual, the nostrils dilated. Then, long and practised fingers moved inside the old trunk and took out the items of the trade. First, she wound her mother’s blue scarf, almost transparent, around the top of her head and tied it at the back, a line of swirling material falling down her back. Then she put on the silk gown that fell to the floor and tied a belt around her waist. Then the pointed shoes. Long earrings for her ears. A small black patch for the height of her left cheek. Bracelets of brass and silver up her sleeves. Then the solemn blue band around her forehead.
She walked quietly through to the full-length mirror in the bedroom.
“Hello, Mother,” she said softly, and not even Jack Merryweather would have recognised her voice.
Their name had not been Wheels. That had come from the wagon, and the constantly turning wheels that by the law of the land sent them round and round England, winter and summer, sunshine and snow. They were Romany. Gipsies. Not allowed to stay anywhere longer than a week.
Back in the early part of the previous century, their ancestors had travelled from central Europe to find a place that would let them live in peace. Some said they came from the plains of Asia, others that they were Russian. Others said a mix of many cultures. Whatever they were, they had been chased from pillar to post for as long as the collective memory could remember.
If anyone found out Fay was a gipsy, they would chase her out into the cold street and tell her to keep moving. She had told Jack when he found her wandering the streets around Baker Street. She was then just seventeen, alone in the world, cast out by her own people after the fight that had killed her family. She had run away to London, frightened for her life.
They had followed the circus the length and breadth of England, the gipsies keeping to themselves, their ornate wooden caravans pulled by big carthorses that were fussed over as much as the children. The circus went from county fair to county fair. There was work for tinkers, fixing the pots and pans of the rural villages, sharpening knives. And telling fortunes. Fay thought her mother’s act was a way of making pennies. The gipsies were thieves and under their strange clothes was hiding all manner of vile disease. You only had to look into the eyes of a gipsy and see the dark side of life, the evil haunted spirit of the damned, unbelievers, cursed by God to wander for the unnatural span of their lives, feared by honest, God-loving folk. Even Fay as a child had learned never to look into a villager’s eyes. In the winters, they camped in barren fields beneath the leafless trees, always on the move. Shunned. Always shunned.
In a family feud, they killed everyone in the other family to stop the retribution. She had run, picking up her skirt, her mother’s savings clutched in her mother’s purse. She thought she was going to die of the cold. She expected the farmer to throw her back into the sleet and mud. Instead, they had put her into a hot bath and a warm bed and let her sleep.
They gave her clothes, took her to the railway station, and waited to see her safely on the train to London. Someone of her people must have seen her. A week after Jack had moved her into the flat, the doorbell had rung and outside was her family trunk. No message. No person. Just the trunk. She had hauled the thing inside and shoved it under the bed. It was weeks before she relaxed. She had a friend in the world after all… The key had been pushed under the door.
Sitting alone on the carpet in the sitting room, dressed in her mother’s clothes, Fay tried to look into the future, bringing the seventh sense, the one of foresight, into her mind. After half an hour she fell back on the carpet exhausted. All she had seen was mud, holes in the ground and barbed wire. And heard the noise. She also knew she was carrying Jack Merryweather’s child, and the child was a girl. There were going to be two of them out on the street if Jack was killed.
3
December 1914
“I thought it might be you,” said Robert St Clair. “Can’t be many chaps with the surname of Merryweather. Make yourself at home, Jack. What a pity. Those nice new uniforms don’t last long out here. We’re in reserve for another three days. Then we go up. This dugout is luxury. Even has a roof. Well, we’d better have a drink. You did bring a drink? Long way from Africa. Have you heard from Harry Brigandshaw? Been here since it started. Stopped the Hun getting to Paris, then we all dug like beavers. Front line’s three hundred yards from here. Rather higgledy-piggledy. Chaps jumped into shell holes at first. Then dug communication trenches. Linked us all up. Jerry did the same. Mostly we’re separated by a couple of hundred yards. Lots of barbed wire, then shell holes and mud. Then the Huns’ barbed wire. Funny thing about barbed wire. You can blow it to heaven but it comes down again, more tangled and twisted. I’m the longest-surviving lieutenant. The rest are dead. Jerry doesn’t like officers. Sometimes we get a hate on the reserve trench. We’ll be in the front line for Christmas. Now, bring out that bottle you’re hiding and give me all the news. You look fit, Jack. Dirty from mud but fit. And please don’t walk around with that hat on in the trenches. We always wear tin hats. Gives the men a feeling of security. Doesn’t make any bloody difference really… Sallie. That was her name. Sallie Barker. Has she sent you any more wires?”
“Nice to see you, Robert, if I’m allowed a word in edgeways. Where do I put my gear?”
“Over on that duckboard.”
“How’s Lucinda?”
“Miserable.”
“Bit of a coincidence isn’t this?”
“Not really, Jack. They circulate a list of new officers and we pick and choose. Pretty random. I was an orderly officer when the list came through. They send us a list a month before the new chaps finish training.”
“And if I’d failed the course?”
“You wouldn’t be here, would you? Now, what have you got in your kitbag, ‘officers for the use of’?”
“A bottle of brandy.”
“Good. Jolly good. Let’s drink it.”
“All of it?”
“Of course. Nothing keeps around here. Unless Jerry puts in a push, we won’t be disturbed much for three days. Our chaps usually know in advance when Jerry is going to come in force. Tell-tale signs. Big guns start blazing. Big movements behind the lines. Our chaps can see from the balloons when Jerry doesn’t shoot them down. Then our chaps shoot down Jerry. Pretty much tit for tat. Jolly nice to see you.”
“Do you always talk so fast?”
“Did you notice? The more I talk the less I think and you don’t want to think around here. I was one of the first territorials. Joined the TA when I came back from Africa. Madge didn’t want to marry and then this bloke Barend pitched up and that was it. Turns out Lucinda and I had been staying in his house for months, the one you stayed in I think. The TA unit was next to the bloody school I taught in. Snotty little kids don’t like history, mark my words. There are usually four of us in a dugout. CO likes to spread his officers around a bit. I was the duty officer when the shell hit the other one. Couple of months ago. Short of officers since. Anyway, now you’re here Jack, which is good. There’s another bloke here tomorrow. You don’t have any food in that kitbag, do you?”
“No, Robert.”
“When I’m really scared shitless, which is most of the time, I think of Elephant Walk. Or Purbeck Manor. And all the food. Strangely it helps. Look, I tell you what. We’ll go show ourselves to the men and then come back for a drink.”
Jack followed him out of the dugout cut into the earth from the reserve trench, which traversed on both sides of them, slightly zigzagged so no one could get into the trench from the other side and shoot everyone in line. His feet sank into the mud and his greatcoat pulled along around his feet. He kept his officer’s hat on his head. Robert had crammed on a tin hat with the thick band that let it rest on the cranium. The man was a wreck. High
overhead he heard a whistling noise and stopped.
“Ours, old chap. Jerry’s getting a hate. In ten minutes Jerry will start shelling us. How it works. Sort of tit for tat. No one getting anywhere in the mud. They say it goes right to the coast, so Jerry can’t outflank us… Sometimes I hear the African lions at night but that’s only when I am asleep.”
The cold had reached into the marrow of his bones as Jack followed. It was getting dark, so the men all looked the same. They seemed pleased to see Robert St Clair. Jack wondered how long he was going to live. All that money and nothing to show for it. No one of his own to spend it when he was dead… Overhead the scream of shells was now continuous.
For Albert Pringle, six thousand miles away in the Rand Club, life could not have been better. The Union government under Louis Botha had known which side their bread was buttered and had declared war on Germany. Put down a rebellion by Bittereinders left over and revived from the Anglo-Boer War and, for all intents and purposes, added German South West Africa to the Union of South Africa, all under Boer control but British hegemony, a satisfactory diplomatic alternative to everyone trying to kill each other. Further north the South Africans were trying to kick the Germans out of Tanganyika, German East Africa; Albert thought he and his new country were doing very well, though he had to smile. Despite Sallie Barker being the brains of the company, she was not a member of the Rand Club. Women were not even allowed in the club, let alone to become members. But Albert, Jack Merryweather’s gentleman’s gentleman, had been proposed, sponsored, and elected all within a week. The only thing that spoke in Johannesburg was money, which was how Albert thought it should be. If anyone knew he had been a valet they said nothing. The past was the past.