The Moon Field

by Judith Allnatt

  George turned round to find Rooke sitting up and holding his stomach.

  ‘I feel awful; I think all that meat and biscuits has disagreed with me again,’ he said ruefully.

  George helped him up and handed him into the field where he disappeared behind the bushes. ‘Keep your head down,’ he called after him and, taking his own advice, he squatted back down in the ditch, nerves fraying further with every lost minute. If Rooke was ill, they were never going to be able to catch up with the others.

  After some time, Rooke emerged, struggling along, bent double in pain. ‘God, I feel terrible. I don’t think I can get along,’ he said.

  ‘Well, we can’t stay here, that’s for sure,’ George said. ‘We could be blown to blazes. If we’re not going to be able to catch up, we need to get off this road.’

  Rooke sat down, drew up his knees and rocked backwards and forwards, moaning, ‘I can’t, I can’t.’

  Panicking, George said, ‘You’re going to have to, Percy. Come on, get up! We’ve got to move in case another lot come over!’ He pulled at his arm. Rooke looked up at him, his face pale and drawn: the face of a frightened boy. Forcing himself to be patient, George spoke more gently, ‘Look, we’ll strike off over the field behind us – put a bit of distance between us and the road then look for some cover for the night.’ He hefted up Rooke’s pack and got his arm over his shoulder so that he could support him. They dragged themselves out of the ditch.

  Keeping low, they stumbled across pasture. To their right, some miles away, lights flickered and bloomed against the lavender cloud as guns rumbled along the horizon. From nearby came the deep sound of a river and all around them the trickling of water in the dykes. They went along slowly, searching for crossing places, George supporting Rooke but all the time looking about him. For all we know, the Alleyman could have broken through, he thought; we’ve been told time and again that’s what they’re trying to do now they’ve got the Belgians cornered – get past us and down to the Channel ports. A new thought struck him: if they ran into some of their own troops, what if they were taken for deserters? Away from their own company they had no one to vouch for them. It wouldn’t look good. As they struggled on, he strained his ears for the sounds of men, dreading the sound of a challenge.

  They were edging along, following the line of a ditch and moving between the scrubby bushes, when Rooke stopped, letting his weight slump against George, saying, ‘I can’t go much further. I’m done up.’ He sank to his knees and was violently sick, George squatting beside him to support him and telling him he would feel better once he’d got rid of it all.

  George looked around desperately for cover for the night. There were no buildings of any kind but on the far side of the next field was the rounded hummock of a haystack. ‘Come on, Percy. You’re going to be all right,’ he said, pointing it out. ‘We’re nearly there. One foot after another.’ Rooke raised a hand weakly to say he was ready and George helped him along over the tussocky grass.

  When they reached it George walked around the nubby shape of the hayrick. Half of it was tightly packed but the other side was a looser heap, pulled apart where the forkfuls of forage had been gouged from it, until it collapsed in on itself. It made easy climbing; George hauled the packs up and then helped Rooke up to the top. Once there, he dug through the outer layer, coarsened and greyed by past rain, to the golden-fawn beneath, releasing a smell of dust and clover, making room for them both to burrow in. It was a good vantage point with a clear view all around. In the twilight, the flat fields seemed deserted. George got out his field rations and ate in silence, concentrating on the process of filling his belly as fast as possible and washing the lumpy meat and dry biscuit down with swigs of metallic-tasting water from his canteen. Rooke took one look at the food and put his head down on his knees. George was so hungry he didn’t care what it tasted like, he just wished there was more.

  George let out an enormous sigh as he lay flat and felt the ache set up in his back in new places and then gradually dissipate as he relaxed his muscles. He touched his breast pocket with its pad of folded letters: long chatty letters from his mother, graver ones from his father, short ones from Kitty who had thawed only enough to reply to him but not enough to do more than ask after his health and give the most basic news. He wished she would write to him properly, in her own voice, with all the things she was thinking and feeling.

  He turned to Rooke. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Not as bad now I can stay still. Very cold. My feet are freezing. Are you taking off your boots?’ He sat up and began to loosen the laces of one of his own.

  George considered how to put his answer without scaring Rooke. ‘Best not, in case we have to leg it. You know … if we had some unwelcome visitors.’ George imagined being woken by a prod from a bayonet or not woken at all but simply shot to blazes before you could even get your eyes open … He tried to block out the images. He felt sure he wouldn’t be able to sleep at all.

  Rooke was quiet for a moment; then he retied his boot and lay back down. After a minute he said, ‘Here, there’s another thing. This wouldn’t count as desertion, would it? If we were found here, like this?’

  With a confidence he didn’t feel, George said firmly, ‘Not if you make every effort to return to your company. We’ll get up and off first thing and soon catch up with them. Either that or report to the first officer we see from another outfit.’

  ‘Righto,’ said Rooke, and George felt a pang at the way that Rooke trusted him and was so easily reassured, when he himself was unsure about everything, feeling unfit to take on the responsibility for another person that circumstances had thrust upon him. Rooke settled himself deeper in the hay, raising the dust and making himself sneeze. George was reminded of Ted and the way he would burrow right down under the blankets with only the crown of his head showing. Sometimes Percy seemed hardly any older, despite his quick wit and eye for the main chance.

  ‘Percy?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you know how old you are?’

  There was no answer and the silence went on for so long that George began to think that he had gone to sleep.

  ‘I haven’t got a birth certificate,’ Rooke said.

  George digested this. It hadn’t really occurred to him that you needed a birth certificate to tell you your age. ‘But wouldn’t your parents …’

  ‘Haven’t got any parents,’ Rooke said. ‘I lived at the Waifs and Strays for a while. They told me I was found stealing out of the bins and they took me in because I was sleeping in a doorway.’

  ‘But you don’t remember it?’

  ‘No. I remember the Home. There were food and clothes but I didn’t like the lessons and it was strict. As soon as I thought I’d have a chance on my own, I legged it.’

  ‘So, you’ve got no one,’ George said wonderingly.

  ‘Only Turland,’ Rooke said. ‘I wasn’t doing too well when I met him – lot of trouble with the law – but he got me the job at the paper and the room at the boarding house.’ He sighed. ‘I fell on my feet all right there. God knows why we had to go and decide to get caught up in all this malarkey.’

  George thought of the warm fug of the parlour at home, the smell of cooking, his mother saying ‘Go carefully – watch out for those motors’ every time he set off on his bike. He couldn’t imagine the cold emptiness that would exist without his family. Without thinking whether it would sound daft or soppy, he said, ‘And me. You’ve got Turland and me and Haycock.’

  There was a pause and then a muttered ‘Thanks.’

  The noise of the guns took on a new ferocity as the night’s bombardment began to build. Rooke shuffled himself round to look towards the guns and George turned over on his stomach. Flashes of light split the darkness in a line that gave definition to an indistinct horizon, and grey puffs of smoke appeared and hung as smudges against the blackness before moving slowly in the westerly wind, lengthening and dissipating until overtaken by the next explosion.

  ‘I bet the lucky
bastards are in billets by now,’ Rooke said.

  ‘I expect so,’ George said, and the thought that they might have gone forward into the line hung unspoken between them.

  ‘George?’ Rooke said. ‘Apart from your family, have you got anyone waiting for you at home?’

  ‘Kitty,’ George said automatically and then stopped, remembering the frostiness of her letters.

  ‘Is she your girl then?’ Rooke asked wistfully.

  ‘No, Kitty’s just Kitty.’ It was hard to explain his certainty that however much she berated him or gave him the cold shoulder, in some way he felt sure she would be anxious to see him back.

  ‘I see,’ Rooke said slowly, clearly confused.

  ‘We’ve been friends ever since school and we had a falling-out because she didn’t want me to enlist,’ George said. ‘I’m not much good at writing letters, not about feelings and that sort of stuff anyway, so I don’t think she’s forgiven me yet. I got her this though.’ He dug deeply into his breast pocket and brought out a thick, cream-coloured postcard. He wiped his hands on his uniform and then held it by its edges for Rooke to see. In the centre of an embossed card frame was a gauze envelope embroidered with tiny pictures: purple and yellow pansies, a lady’s fan, a swallow with a flower in its beak, and beneath, a banner reading ‘TO MY DEAR FRIEND’.

  ‘See, you put the address on the back and a little card inside,’ George said triumphantly, taking out a tiny slip of paper. He held it up between his chunky thumb and forefinger. It had a picture of a soldier on the battlefield handing a letter to a winged child and a printed message that said at the top ‘Happy Birthday Greetings’ and below ‘From a Soldier of the King’.

  ‘Very fancy, I’m sure,’ Rooke said in a lah-di-dah voice.

  George grinned. ‘It’s her birthday soon. I thought she’d like it – as we both worked on the post, you know.’ He put it back carefully, sandwiched between the wad of letters in his pocket. ‘Hopefully she’ll start writing me longer letters at least.’

  ‘It must be nice to get letters but I suppose you have to be able to write them first – and you have to have a girl to write to, of course.’ After a pause he said, ‘It’d be awful to get shot up before you’d even, you know, been with a girl …’

  ‘You can’t think like that,’ George said firmly. ‘You might even meet someone while we’re out here. If we free the Belgians there’ll be victory marches and girls galore taking buttons off your uniform!’

  Rooke pulled a wry face and dug into the hay, shivering and pulling it over him. In the half-light he looked terribly washed out and George thought of Ted when he’d had flu and how his mother had sat up all night in their room with him.

  George pulled his greatcoat more tightly around him and tried to stay awake to keep watch. That was what he was out here for, wasn’t it, in a way, to protect Ted and Lillie from the same danger? The Germans must at all costs be kept from breaking through to the Channel ports; it was unthinkable that they should ever set foot on British soil. He thought of all at 26 Leonard Street sleeping peacefully as the fire burned down in the hearth downstairs and the last wisps of smoke eddied from the chimney.

  The disc of a full moon and the cold white points of stars were now visible in the clear sky. The cold numbed his cheeks and jaw as though it beat down on him from the vastness above. With a pang of jealousy, he wondered if Edmund had sent Violet a sweetheart card: he had seen ones that said ‘To my Dear Sweetheart’ when he was choosing, and messages with crossed flags that said ‘A kiss from France’. He closed his eyes, shutting out the flashing reports and the stars and thought of Violet as he first saw her when she was taking the photograph of the stream: the concentration in her eyes; the play of dappled sunlight reflected from the water on to her blouse as she leant forward.

  George woke and blinked, feeling drops of water beading his eyelashes. He freed his arm from the pile of damp hay that covered him, wiped his face on his sleeve and pushed his hand through his hair; everything was cold and sodden. He lay still, trying to regain the blessed insensibility of sleep but as he recognised the humped shape of Rooke’s back and remembered where he was, he felt afraid. How late was it? They had meant to set off at first light. He sat bolt upright and discovered a sea of whiteness. The hayrick was an island afloat in a thick ground mist that reached halfway up its sides and extended around it as far as he could see. The sky was a soft grey, the air still and damp, smudging the outlines of distant trees that stood kneedeep in a lake of milk.

  There was an eerie quiet after the shelling of the night before but, in the background, George was aware of a muffled, regular sound that was familiar to him and yet seemed out of place. His mind, still muzzy with sleep, refused to make sense of it at first but as his ear became attuned, he recognised it as the sound of gently lapping water. He leant across and grasped Rooke’s shoulder. Rooke groaned and tried to push him off but George shook him awake.

  ‘Bloody hell, what is it?’ Rooke said.

  ‘We’ve been flooded, that’s what it is.’

  Rooke sat up, small and pale in his oversized greatcoat and with his hair sticking up on his crown and scattered with strands of hay.

  The slow lapping and the sound of droplets from the edge of the rick dripping through the mist into water beneath were unmistakable.

  George took an empty bully-beef tin and crawled to the edge of the stack. He dropped it through the whiteness and they heard the splash below.

  Rooke joined him. ‘How deep do you think it is?’

  George picked up his bayonet and scrambled as far as he could down the sloping side of the rick. He took off his coat, pulled up the sleeve of his jacket and thrust the bayonet into the water, extending the length of his arm into the coldness. Loose hay floated on the surface and there was a strange smell, quite different to the smell of fresh river water at home. ‘I can’t feel the bottom,’ he said, over his shoulder, ‘but I’d say at least half of the stack is out of the water so it can’t be over our heads.’

  ‘I bloody well hope not,’ Rooke said. ‘I can’t swim.’

  George climbed back up and hefted his pack on to his shoulder, saying, ‘Well, we’re going to have to chance it. It’s not as if anyone’s going to come along and rescue us, is it?’

  Rooke peered gingerly down.

  ‘Come on; I’ll go first.’ George stowed his bayonet and picked up his rifle. He half climbed, half slid down the greasy surface of the wet haystack and entered the water in a stumbling rush as he raised his rifle in both hands above his head. The shock of the cold made his breath catch and his balls shrink. Through clenched teeth, he called up to Rooke, ‘Come on in, the water’s lovely!’

  Rooke, seeing that George’s head and shoulders were above water and free of the mist, got his stuff, shuffled slowly down on his backside and slid in, swearing. He followed George, who was feeling his way forward in a straight line away from the tumbled side of the rick.

  ‘It smells funny, don’t it?’

  George sniffed. There was a smell of old drains and a tang of something else – he sniffed again. Salt. ‘It’s seawater!’ he said.

  Rooke, his teeth chattering, nodded. ‘Is it rising?’

  ‘Let’s not stick around to see.’

  They waded side by side towards the line of a fence, the square tops of its posts protruding a few inches above the surface like a string of stepping stones. George was painfully aware that they made a sitting target, dark and solid through the pale mist that rose and drifted a little with their slow movement only to settle again behind them.

  They followed the fence until it disappeared and then stopped, unsure whether they had just reached the end of the field or whether the land sloped away.

  ‘I think the mist’s thinning,’ George said. It was true; the breeze from the sea had returned and the faint warmth of the early morning sun was breaking up the solid whiteness: opacity diluting to translucence. They could see the leaves and twigs that littered the water; an old sa
ck floated by and a bucket caught against a fence post thumped woodenly in the tiny swell.

  ‘D’you think some kind of sea defences could have burst?’ Rooke asked.

  ‘There was a full moon last night so maybe there was an extra high tide. I don’t know; I don’t understand it.’

  ‘How far do you think it stretches?’

  George shrugged. ‘It’s so flat it could be miles.’

  Rooke was holding on to the last fence post with both hands. ‘I’ve been thinking: what if we step right into a canal? We’d just sink – we’d simply disappear.’

  George imagined suddenly feeling nothing beneath his feet, water closing over his head, not being able to breathe, the weight of his pack pulling him down, impossible for either one of them to pull the other out …

  Rooke, pale and shivering, looked terrified, gripping the fence post as a drowning man would a raft. George thought he might not be able to shift him. He took a deep breath. ‘I’ll go ahead,’ he said. ‘You follow a little way behind, then if … anything happens … you’ll know to turn aside. All right?’ Before Rooke had time to answer he set off, taking a gamble that Percy would be equally afraid of being left behind. After a moment or two, Rooke waded after him.

  Fifty yards out, George caught his foot against something submerged and stumbled, sloshing into the water up to his shoulders. He floundered and righted himself. With a gasp, he pulled his boot free and carried on.

  He moved on through the debris: a rabbit hutch lying low in the water, branches, straw, and the empty tins that littered the sides of roads and railway tracks, discarded by troops passing to and from the line. An open newspaper floated face-up as though someone had just set it down for a moment during his breakfast. He fished it out but it was in French and yielded no information. He gave it back to the water, wondering at the mixture of objects, the lives of so many people who would never normally meet now thrown so close together that their belongings were mixed like vegetables in soup.