Barbed Wire and Roses

by Peter Yeldham

  Letters from Jane don’t seem to reach me here. Maybe the ships with our mail are still being sunk, or else they think that letters from home might be bad for us. I really miss her letters. I really miss Jane, and the small boy who is our son. Even if it is hard to miss someone you have never met.

  Whenever I tell Henry I’m a father, she smiles and says I’ll be looking forward to going home some day soon, and I can teach him to play cricket and football. I’m not sure if she really believes I’m a father.

  They don’t seem to have many records, or know much about me — except that I’m a ‘wee bit dangerous’. I can’t help them, because I don’t know much about myself, not really. I only know I had friends who are mostly dead, and there were whiz-bangs that never stopped and made it really difficult to remember things. But at night, after Sister Henry talks in that kind and gentle way, I sleep soundly, thinking of home, of being a dad to a small figure holding a bat or a football.

  I often try to think of Jane and what she looks like now, but the only photograph I had was lost, along with all my papers. I had it when I dived into the mud, trying to escape the bombs that were going off inside my head. That memory is clear and horrible. They pulled me out, but couldn’t find my belongings. Everyone seemed to be shouting and looking at me as if I was trying to lose the war, and they said they didn’t give a bugger about my stupid photo. That was why I tried to dive back in the mud again to find it, before they tied me up. I’ve still got the marks of the rope on my body where I fought for hours trying to get free. Till the ambulance came. At first I thought it was a hearse. Same thing, really. They call them meat wagons, those motor vans that collect the dead.

  There was a lot of trouble about losing my papers in the mud. Nobody cared about my photograph of Jane, but without any papers you’re a misfit. You give your name, and they don’t believe you. Tell them where you’ve fought, and they say you’re lying. I’m like someone who doesn’t belong in this world or anywhere, not without my papers.

  Tonight I have to stop writing. Attila is on the prowl. She suspects me of something, but she doesn’t know I keep this book and a pencil underneath the mattress. If she found out she’d destroy it. Especially if she reads what’s said in here about her. One night I was stupid enough to tell her that I had a son, aged three. And that he was born on the day we landed at Gallipoli. I was very pleased with myself for remembering that, but she looked scornful.

  ‘Really?’ She had a sarcastic way of speaking, while gazing down what I suppose was an aristocratic nose, that made everyone feel she didn’t believe a word of anything she was told. ‘How do we know you were at Gallipoli?’ she said.

  I tried to tell her I was. Even if they didn’t have my papers. That I really had a son. And I was going home to teach him how to play cricket and football. She pretended not to hear, then brought me a tablet, one of the knockout ones, and stood there making me take it, saying I was hallucinating and going off my rocker.

  But if any of us go off our rockers, it would only be because of the names she calls us. Terrible names. Weasels, cowards and lily-livered scum; when she gets wound up she’s liable to say anything. We’re told we’re in a funk; we’re spineless, craven creatures who all deserve white feathers. Or a bullet at dawn, that’s what she really has in mind. She’d like to be the marksman who fires the gun. She would, she’s said so.

  It would not be at all quick, she tells us. One in the balls to start with — only she calls it the groin — then one into a knee, followed by a hip and a shoulder, before she decides to take pity and puts one through the heart. She’s a good shot, she boasts, from killing deer and pheasant with her daddy, the earl. She never says these things when there are doctors around, or any witnesses to hear the filth she spouts. And it is filth. Her eyes seem to flash and her face goes the colour of brick. At times like that I start to wonder if Attila herself might be the one who’s going off her rocker.

  A week’s gone by, I think. No letter from Jane. One from my mother, though, who said she goes to church each morning to pray for me. She hopes we have proper beds and enough food, and expresses the wish that I’m being given plenty of leave so that I have a chance to explore England. I don’t really know how to reply to my dear, sweet mum. She seems to be imagining a different kind of war to the one we’ve been in.

  Nothing’s happened at Netley. A few people died, a few arrived as mad as the rest of us. But there is something going on here; all week there’ve been rumours — strange rumours going around this place. People getting together, whispering, nodding, asking each other: Have you heard the news? Do you believe it can be true?

  ‘You mean the war’s over?’ some poor dill asked, and we told him to keep taking the tablets and get off himself, the war’s not over, this war’s going to last for-bloody-ever, like wars used to in the olden days. Hadn’t he ever heard of the Hundred Years War? This one will be the Two Hundred Years War. No, the rumour is about Attila! And already, this morning, it’s more than a rumour.

  I was right about her! She is off her rocker!

  Last night she was taken away. Bed 10 told me when I came back from having treatment. He was jumping about like a jack-in-the-box, laughing in celebration, as if he was going genuinely crazy.

  ‘Attila the Hun’s gone!’ he shouted excitedly. ‘They took her off in a straitjacket. She threw acid over some poor sod, just because he wet himself. So we’re finally free of the old bitch, free of her at last!’

  I sleep much better after hearing this. I dream about being back at university. It was a good dream, but then all the uni students turned into Turks. They invited me to come home with them, back to their beautiful home called Gallipoli, and the next thing I’m on a steep hillside where the hundreds of dugouts look like deep mine shafts. Only now they’re telling me to watch out because they’re going to start shooting at me and bury me down deep where not even Jane can find me.

  They’re good shots, those Turks. Fatal to stick your head above the parapet. Put up one of our periscope mirrors, and they smash it to pieces. So we know what’d happen to our heads if we were silly enough to raise them for a squiz at the view. Anyway, who the hell wants to see the view? What is there to see? Just the wounded on stretchers being taken down to hospital ships, or the dead being buried in bulk. God’s Acre, they used to call that burial ground, before it became too big and had to be renamed God’s Square Mile. I can remember things like that, but I’m still not sure if my son’s name is Richard or something else. I seem to remember it was going to be Emily, but that can’t be right!

  Sometimes on Gallipoli, the enemy trenches were so close that we could hear them talk or sing. Great singing voices, the Turks. One of our mates could play the violin, and some nights when he played a sonata all went quiet in their trenches, and after he finished we’d hear calls of ‘Bravo!’, even shouts of ‘Encore, encore!’ and the sound of their applause. Sometimes he would oblige them and play again. They like music. I don’t think we hated the Turks. We just had to kill them, or else they’d kill us. Kill? I tried to tell my Scottish doctor that must be the worst four-letter word in our language. The most savage and uncivilised. He just shook his head and looked at me as if I was stupid.

  I don’t know what the Turkish word for kill is. All we could hear when they attacked was, ‘Allah, Allah!’

  ‘We’ll Allah you, you bastards,’ we’d shout back.

  We called them bastards so often that one we captured asks if Bastard is one of our gods? My mate Bluey tells him: Yeah, ‘course it is. He explains that Bastard is a special god. The Big God in charge of all the others, that’s the Bastard.

  Bluey Watson, shearer from Walgett, rough as guts, best bloke to have with you in a pub fight or holed up in a dugout. Flattened Double-Trouble after our first leave in London, then cried his eyes out when Double got blown to bits. Was the first time I knew a tough shearer from the bush could cry. Tried to pretend he wasn’t crying, that some grit got in his eyes. A dim corporal, thick as tw
o planks called him a poofter because of it, and three of us had to hang on to Bluey while the dill ran for his life. Dear old Blue. Got a flesh wound at Pozieres, and they reckon he’s dead! How can anyone die from a stupid bloody flesh wound?

  ‘Gangrene?’ I asked the doctors, and they told me to get to buggery out of there. Said they were too busy to answer silly questions. I should’ve gone back to the farmhouse, back to Marie-Louise and stayed there with her. Stayed warm and cosy in bed, where there was someone to love me. Let the fucking politicians fight the fucking war. The old men who send the young men to be killed are always big on rhetoric and aggression. Never seen a shot fired in their lives, but they like to make wars. It’s good for their prestige, making wars and being photographed with soldiers.

  Yes, I should’ve stayed with her. Yesterday I told the Scottish quack that’s what I should’ve done. He just listened and wrote some words down on paper. It’s a new sort of treatment. I suppose it’s better than the last one: where they used to give me so many shocks with the electric voltage that I felt like a light bulb. Sometimes my legs would shake so much after it that I couldn’t control them, I’d try to walk and just fall over. Helpless, like a young baby trying to take a first step, or an old bloke trying to take his last. Bed 10 reminds me that Attila used to watch and laugh at this, but we don’t think she’s laughing now.

  The new sort of treatment is talk. We sit and talk to the doctor, tell him anything we want to, and he listens, writes things down, asks questions. It’s called the ‘talking cure’, but the Scottish quack says there’s also another name. Something therapy. Invented by some quack in Vienna. We just go on talking until we’ve got nothing left to say, then we go back to the ward and next day we talk some more. I told the Scottish quack all about Marie-Louise. He wrote that down. Then asked me questions about if I’d enjoyed it, and was she nice, so I told him it was none of his bloody business.

  ‘Of course it’s my business,’ he said. ‘It’s part of the treatment. We have to know how you behave, both in and out of bed.’ He kept on and on, so to shut him up I said she was a wonderful fuck, the best ever, and he wrote all that down too. Today he asks me when I last had leave. Ages ago, before Christmas, but I can’t remember which month. November, I think, and tell him it was cold. Perishing, the English call it. He asks me what I did on leave.

  What did I do? What the hell can anyone do in a place where they’re a total stranger, with only a few lousy days? Not much. Not much at all. I saw odd things. Like little English children being carefully taught to hate the enemy. A picture of a baby holding a bayonet, so it looked like he was defending his nice mummy from the ferocious Hun. In the shops, in children’s picture books, I saw a poem about a house that went like this:

  This is the house that Jack built.

  And…

  This is the bomb that fell on the house that Jack built.

  And…

  This is the Hun that dropped the bomb, that fell on the house that Jack built.

  And this… ?

  This is the gun that killed the Hun, who dropped the bomb that fell on the house that Jack built.

  I asked the Scottish quack what he thinks of teaching little kids such things, but he doesn’t answer at first. Just stares at me. Strokes his thick Scottish beard. ‘I’m the one who asks the questions,’ he says at last. ‘What else did you do on leave?’

  What else? I wanted to go to some village near Cambridge and talk to Elizabeth Marsden, but I can’t remember the name of the place where she lives. I can remember telling her all about my family — about great-grandfather Jeremy Conway, and Matthew and Daniel who were currency lads when Sydney was a convict town, but the name of her village is lost in a faraway afternoon, when we sat and talked in the teashop and walked to Kings Cross where she kissed me goodbye. I remember that kiss, her soft warm lips on my cheek. I often think of Elizabeth. I suppose it is because I don’t have a photograph, although I can remember what she looks like. But not where she lives.

  It was only a few hours, and you can’t really fall in love with someone in a few hours — at least I don’t believe you can, yet I keep thinking of her and wishing I’d met her sooner, not at the end of my leave. So why can’t I remember the name of the place? If I could, then I’d be able to find her again, I tell the Scots quack, and that way I could find out if I really did fall in love with her.

  He writes it all down. Pages of it, hour after bloody hour. God only knows what he’ll do with it. I began to run out of things to tell him. I thought I’d have to make some up. I remembered one thing — meeting a woman who works in the Woolwich Arsenal where they make the munitions. There’s thousands of girls and women of all ages who work there. The one I met was quite old, at least forty. She told me that some of the workers get ill — TNT poisoning — and lots of them, even the young girls, die from it, did he know that? He makes some sort of murmur, clears his throat, and doesn’t bother to write this down.

  What else? he wants to know. I tell him I stayed in a hostel. Two shillings a night. Looked out the window at people in the streets walking past. Then one day I went to a picture show and saw a film with Mary Pickford.

  What else? Not much else.

  Oh yes. Something else. I got into a row because I didn’t properly salute an English officer. In Piccadilly, it was, near the Circus. Going on leave we were all given these warnings. All the officers, especially the British, have been complaining Australian soldiers won’t salute them. Orders came that we were getting a bad name, and any soldier caught not saluting would be reported, have their pay docked and their leave cancelled at once. Trouble is, we’re not good at saluting. We’re not conscripts, we’re all volunteers who decided to go and fight for our country, which makes us feel we’re as good as any other bloke! So why should we salute some joker with a few pips on his shoulder who probably works in an orderly room or an army Q store? Most of us reckon the only salute they deserve is a two-fingered one, or else the famous Outback Aussie salute, which is waving your hands to get rid of flies while you curse the flaming little buggers and tell ‘em to piss off and buzz in someone else’s nose and mouth.

  Still, I wanted my six days without any trouble. God knows I’d earned it — it’d been nearly a year since the last leave. The trouble with six days, you hardly get to know the place or find your way around before it’s back to the train and off to the bloody trenches. We never get a proper chance to meet people, which is why so many blokes spend their leave with the prostitutes. What else is leave for? most of them reckon. It’s too hard to make friends with anyone in six days, so that leaves the scrubbers or the amateur ones — the town bikes — who see a slouch hat and they’re like bees around a honey pot.

  But no tarts for me, I decide, and I’ll do my best to salute. What’s more, I keep to it. Until this dag in a shiny new uniform comes the raw prawn and says I didn’t salute him with proper respect. That really got my goat. He was only a young lieutenant, but he reminded me of the Pommy major who cost me my stripes, so I remember the old joke and ask this galah who the hell he thinks he is. Is he General Birdwood? In that case, he should shove his feathers up his arse and fly away like any other bird would. His face goes sort of purple, his eyes bulge, and he starts to shout for a military policeman.

  ‘Stand to attention!’ he bellows at me, while we can hear the whistle of military police from not far away.

  ‘Stand to attention be buggered!’ I yelled, and took off down this street called the Haymarket like a rabbit with a greyhound on his tail.

  The Scottish quack chuckles and writes it down. Then he asks if I had any ‘relations’ while I was there. I pretend I don’t know what he means, and say, I’ve got no relations here. Only got relations back in Australia.

  ‘Lassies, I’m talking about,’ he says. ‘They say London streets are full of whores.’ But it comes out of his mouth sounding more like ‘hooers’. I say it might be full of hooers, but it’s also full of the clap, and I’m a married man who�
��ll be going home to his wife when you people have finished your war. He gives me a bit of a sharp look and then decides to write this down too.

  When we’re not busy with the talking cure, we’re made to go to classes, where we’re taught other things to help us. We’re taught how to sew and do basket-weaving. They say these are good and useful pursuits which will calm us down and help prepare us to go back to the front-line. They don’t like it a bit when some of the patients say it’ll come in handy later on if we get our legs shot off, or if we cough out our guts from the mustard gas. It’ll be real useful when we’re sent back home in a sling or a wheelchair, because we can make baskets or sew for a living. I tell this to the laird doctor who frowns and pretends he hasn’t heard it, and doesn’t bother to write it down.

  At the end of our next session, he breaks some very bad news: the news that I’m cured. Fit and well, he says. In good enough shape to return to the war.

  ‘I don’t feel in good shape,’ I tell him, ‘and I’m bloody certain I don’t want to return to the war. Let someone else fight the rotten bastards. You go and do it, mate,’ I say to him. ‘Get off your arse and see what it’s like over there.’

  ‘Conway, you’ve got two choices,’ he says, not a bit friendly now. ‘You either go back to France and do your duty, or else you face a court-martial and then a firing squad for desertion.’

  ‘Great choices,’ I reply. ‘What a fucking nice bastard you turned out to be. You great fat slob of a Scots git! You lump of stinking haggis! Now shove me on a charge for insubordination, and I’ll get at least three months in the clink for insulting an officer.’

  But he just smiles: he knows what I’m trying, and says he wouldn’t dream of charging me. It’d be unfair. And besides, he says: in his opinion I’m not fit or well enough to spend any time in a bad place like gaol.

  SIXTEEN

  It was midnight. Patrick had not realised it was so late, caught up in another day of the notebook and its disturbing memories that seemed to make his grandfather so painfully alive to him. Claire was asleep as he slid carefully into bed, managing not to wake her.