A Coin for the Hangman

by Spurrier, Ralph

  I’d see the damaged and the deranged wandering the streets. The widows, whose husbands had been blown to bits by artillery fire, cooked alive in burning tanks, singled out from all the others by a sniper who hadn’t cared who it was and shot them through the eye, their brains spattering the soldiers following on behind. The mothers, who had lost their sons – literally – not knowing which part of the war had swallowed up their young, speared like fish by giants and then carried home to a faraway place to be part of a monstrous meal. Everyone carried a painful memory and I watched them all. Watched them slowly die, the dull light in their eyes betraying empty smiles, as they continued to stumble and falter through their meaningless lives.

  I have no fear of dying. No, not at all. Not…

  What I fear is not being alive. The not being here, in this world. I have begun to wake in the early hours with the light just beginning to break through the high window of the cell and I sweat at the thought of the end. Not THE end, but what comes after. Which is nothing. The terror of not existing can overwhelm me. There would be no escape even if I were lying in my bed in Bradford and listening to the milkman passing by on his rounds. Eventually, we all end up in nothingness. I thought I could get through it. Thought I was different; that I understood. That I could seek some way out or round or through the impasse. But the way was blocked, the path overgrown, the wall too high. I have to think of the millions and millions who have all ceased to exist, dying slowly over months in pain, or suddenly in the street or violently, and bit by bit I can control my fear. If I even begin to pretend that an appeal might succeed I can quickly slip over the edge once more and believe I will live, but the only way I hold onto my life is not to imagine living. What does it matter anyway? Now, twenty years, fifty years hence, we all end up not existing. I have already ceased to exist. I am hidden, already on that conveyor belt into the machine where I will be crushed and powdered and slipped into the unmarked ground. By summer’s end the grass will have blanketed the turned earth and worms will do their work. Who is there to care what is happening to me? George? He just laughs at my stupidity. The shop was renamed Tanner’s when my mother married that monster. Eastman’s has gone, Eastman is going. Victor Watson, the cinema manager, will only curse that he now has to train another projectionist. All the others in the town? I will be like Saul Martin. Disappeared. No-one will remember and that makes it easy to leave.

  Until I think of Madeleine, then, Oh my dove, the terrors return.

  I had to stop writing last night. The pain of that loss was too much to explain. I have an hour’s exercise each day – well, you’d know this, wouldn’t you – and it gave me a chance to clear my head a little. I am kept segregated from the other prisoners although I can still hear them shouting and cursing in this Babel. “Eastman, you drink your own piss? Mother killer! Hanging’s too good for you.” I hear them all the time. I imagine them cursing and gnashing their teeth, their faces pressed against the cell doors, venomous rage spattering the metal around the spy-hole. I close my ears to it all. They mean nothing to me. I avoid them all. Writing. Reading. One human conversing directly with another through a book. No distractions. Well, just like this diary. Like I’m talking to you now, Mr Manley.

  Yes, now I know your name. I had asked a warder if he knew who the hangman would be.

  “What d’you want to know for? Doesn’t matter, does it?”

  Warder Greenslade had been bringing up my food and this particular time he had put the plate of food on the desk and had slopped the tea over the side. The dense brown liquid ran down the cup and onto the edges of the pages of the diary that I was writing at the time. Can you see the stain here, Reg? That was him. I’m afraid I got a little angry. I jumped up from my chair and, of course, being the size I am, he probably thought I was going to attack him. It was the very first time I had frightened anyone. Well, apart from Mary that time in the playground. He just blurted out your name. To be honest with you – and I hope you don’t mind – I was a little bit disappointed it wasn’t going to be Pierrepoint. I know that sounds a bit ungrateful, but his technique and speed are legend, aren’t they? But I’ve been thinking about it and I’m glad it’s not Pierrepoint as I suspect he’s done so many he cares less who it is these days. He doesn’t sound like someone who would bother with this diary. I hope you don’t mind that I call you Reg from now on? Reg. Makes it a bit more personal, doesn’t it?

  You know, thinking about that warder, I’ve always hated the way people were careless about books. I’d go down to the Boots Library and pick out a detective novel and there’d be bits of food, tea ring stains or dirty finger-marks on the pages. Even worse were those who wrote comments on the endpapers or even in the text itself; all of that drives me mad. In the end I stopped borrowing books from Boots and started to buy my own. I had to check over the second-hand books to make sure no-one had written in them before I bought them. I don’t really mind a simple name on the endpaper and perhaps a date, but why do people do that, Reg? That beautiful cream paper, the susurration of the pages as you delicately fan, fan, fan them; the woody perfume released which makes you want to push your nose into the book itself. One of the wonders of the world and people go and scribble all over them. I don’t understand.

  Oh, by the way, I’ve moved my desk again so that my back is now to the door. I was being distracted by people peering in at the spy-hole, my eye catching the little beam of light that always appeared whenever it was slid open. What did they want? They never came in. They were just looking at me, sizing me up, measuring my worth, peering in to see what I was doing. Now I’ve turned my back on them all.

  The warders treated my books badly. I suppose they were trying to find any hidden razor blades or pills. They flipped them open and roughly fingered the pages or held them by the spine and let the pages hang from the binding, straining the glue and stitching. They are no different from George Tanner, you know. Did I tell you he had been a prison warder once? In a camp in Germany somewhere, processing suspected SS officers just after the war, he said. I could see him handling books that way, waving them in front of the prisoners, throwing them across the cell. I was sure he had used a copy of Melville’s Moby Dick to light the coal fire that first winter he was around in Bradford. A bit ironic really, Reg. The story of a tyrannical captain determined to search out and destroy the whale that bit off his leg. I always saw George as someone harbouring a dark secret, someone not quite what they seem. And the biblical Ahab arranged for the false accusations and eventual imprisonment of Naboth.

  Anyway, it was after that I moved all the books up to my room. George always scoffed at the rows of books I had around the house, running his nicotine-stained fingers along the spines, pulling out one here and there and asking me if I’ve read this or that.

  “Read ’em all, have you, Henry?” he’d ask. “Blimey, you’ve got time on your hands. I read a book once. During the war it was. They gave us a poetry book – can’t think of the title now – but I only looked at it a couple of times. Don’t know what happened to it though. Probably used it to wipe me arse when I got caught short.” He’d laugh.

  I can still hear that laugh, Reg, a coarse rolling laugh that often developed into a coughing fit. It was those filthy cigarettes he smoked, the ones he got on the black market and sold to his friends down the pub. You know, he was a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde character come to think of it. Whenever he was with my mother I never heard him swear. He was only ever coarse when I was around. He probably thought I was like him, one of the lads. His lads. He always called them “his lads” – the other soldiers in his company. And the “lads” down the pub. I’d see him in there whenever I’d drop in between film shows and there he’d be at the bar with a group of cronies around him. Victor, the cinema manager, was often there as well, listening to his grubby stories.

  I’ve deliberately held off from talking about my mother, Reg. It’s hard to think about her now. We supported each other in those years after my father died. Those first
few months after the war started she took me into her bed. I had thought for a long time she kept me close because she believed I was frightened at night, but I suspect now it was because she was lonely. She said about a week after my dad’s funeral that she would feel happier if she knew where I was whenever an air raid siren went off. It just seemed natural to climb into the big bed with the heavy eiderdown wrapping over me. And when my mother came to bed later in the evening I’d feel the comforting press of the springs and the warmth of her as she slipped beneath the covers.

  In truth – well, it’s obvious now, isn’t it? – my mother was desperate to find a new husband. She was a little over thirty when my father died and that’s really no age to be a widow. Those war years were difficult for her, trying to run the shop on her own and with more and more rationing coming in every month. At those times I wasn’t at school I’d be left behind to run the shop while she queued up outside the butchers or bakers with all the other women. I learnt how to weigh the sweets, measure the loose tobacco and count the money and change in those hours on my own in the shop. At first I used to worry about her not coming back at all and how I was going to run the shop all on my own and what I would eat. I’d look along the shelves and try and work out how long the sweets would last and who would look after me.

  Later we settled down into a regular routine – and I reverted to my own bed. Although I had lost my father I realized that I wasn’t alone and that many of the children of my age didn’t have fathers either – they were all away at war. Well, probably languishing in some far-flung part of the British Isles, more like. I’d hear conversations in the shop, snippets of comments that the women of the town would share with my mother.

  “He’s stuck up in Scotland somewhere and can’t get a pass. Heaven knows when I’ll see him next.” “He hasn’t been back in weeks now. The children are beginning to forget who he is.” “I’m sure he’s got some fancy piece and that’s why he doesn’t want to visit.” “I keep writing to him every day but I only get the occasional letter back. I worry he’s lost interest.”

  Every conversation seemed to be concerned with how people were coping with rationing and without their husbands. I can remember my mother getting angry with one of the wives – I can’t remember her name now – when she was in a queue at the butcher’s one Wednesday afternoon. I was on the way back from school when I saw the line of women stretching from the doorway down the hill. My mother was about half-way along the queue, a wicker basket hanging from her arm. As I walked over to join her I heard this woman say: “It’s alright for you. You don’t have a husband to worry about. You’re free to pick and choose who you like – even if it is only Victor.”

  The woman had turned her back on my mother as if to end the conversation but my mother pulled on her shoulder.

  “Excuse me. That’s none of your business and I’ll not take any criticism from someone who may not be as Snow White as she likes to make out.” My mother’s face had an angry flush to it. I was confused over who Victor was – I didn’t know the cinema manager’s name until much later – and why he would be mentioned in connection to my mother.

  “And what do you mean by that?” The woman’s raised voice began to turn heads in the queue around her.

  “You know.” My mother stood her ground, bringing up her basket in front of her. “Don’t think you haven’t been seen.”

  I stood off to one side watching as the queue began to roll and shuffle with my mother and the woman facing up to one another. Another voice joined in from just up the line.

  “Yes, last Friday night. Down Bull Pit. Whose husband was he? Mary Jo from Ohio?” There was laughter from the women around.

  The woman whirled around on her accuser. “We only went out for a drink. Nothing more than that.”

  “Looked like he was drinking off your tonsils, love. You better be careful. If your Stan finds out, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  For a moment I thought the woman was going to physically attack her accuser but just as suddenly she crumpled and put her hands up to her face, turning away from the queue. My mother dropped her basket on the floor and put her arm around her shoulder, trying to comfort her with words I couldn’t quite hear. As I write I can see it all so clearly I could almost paint the scene for you, Reg. My mother and the woman surrounded by the others in the queue, some of them smiling or laughing, some of them turning away their faces, embarrassed by what they knew, by what they felt.

  There was one incident in the war that I vividly remember but which I never told my mother about and I think I was the only one to see it. It was a Sunday evening in March 1944 and I had gone out for a walk up on Tory. You can see way over the town from up there and suddenly I heard the sound of aircraft engines coming in low from the Trowbridge district – from the south. I could see a Halifax bomber with smoke billowing from one of its engines, circling round and round obviously looking for somewhere to land. As it came over for the third time three figures fell away from the belly of the plane. Two of them disappeared into the propellers, shards of body tumbling backwards in the slipstream of the faltering plane. The third managed to miss the propellers but the height was insufficient for the parachute to open fully and slow the descent. I watched as the bright exclamation mark dropped from the darkening sky and for a moment I thought it was going to land right on top of me, but it fell to earth about ten yards away, crashing through the roof of an outside privy of one of the Tory houses. Reg, I saw the face of the airman a second before he hit the roof, his parachute collapsing above him and ready to enshroud him. He was looking straight at me, Reg, and he knew he was going to die. Dying. You must know that look – all those people dropping away to their ends. Hooded and shrouded. Buried and forgotten.

  I left the scene without going to help. I knew there was no point. The parachute was draped over the remains of the privy roof and was billowing uselessly in the evening breeze, a white napkin hanging from a table of a departed diner. I learnt later that the Halifax crashed up on the hill-top by Christ Church, taking the pilot and rear gunner into oblivion. Just two out of the crew of seven got out alive. It was the talk of the town for a while but I never told anyone what I had seen.

  Of course, at the end of the war there was a lot of excitement – for a short while. People started to complain that their men were being held up somewhere in the system and why weren’t they coming home? Eventually they started to appear in their demob suits, drifting back into town in twos and threes. In that summer of 1945 I can remember standing alone on the station railway bridge and a train came in, the engine halting just beneath my feet. The steam wreathed up around the iron mesh of the bridge – ah! I can smell that now, Reg – and on the platform there were a number of women with a few children milling around. I thought, at first, they were going off to Bath but they made no move to get on the train as it stood there. Some men got off, looking like old-time gangsters with their brown serge and purple stripe suits. You could always spot them as demob soldiers because the rest of us, after six years and the clothes rationing, were beginning to look little better than tramps. Scruffiness had become a way of life. I had to put cardboard from the shop sweet boxes into my shoes to try and cover the holes that had worn through the leather. One shoe had “HUMBUG” in it and the other had “SHERBERT”. Funny, eh? I remember seeing these women looking up and down the train obviously trying to spot their husbands. One of them took a few hesitant steps forward, stopped and looked back at the group of women as if she was looking for permission. It was almost theatrical, Reg, the way these men and women stumbled towards each other. Me, in the Gods as it were, looking down on these mortals as they tried to recognize each other. I heard a cry from one of the women and she rushed off down the platform to throw her arms around one of the men. His hat fell off backwards by the force of her embrace and it rolled around on the platform, the brim just touching the edge of a puddle left by a recent rain shower. I could see his brilliantined hair slicked back as he buried his face i
n her neck and I wondered what it was like to be physically loved like that. I wanted it so much.

  One by one, the others met. Some, I could see, were hesitant as if they didn’t recognize each other. I suppose, after all that time, they were like strangers to each other. One woman offered up a child to one of the men but the child turned its head away, fighting to be put down on the ground. The man tried to coax the child who, I could just hear, was now wailing and refusing to budge. The reunited families made their way over the bridge, past me and off into the town. As the train left the platform and moved away towards Avoncliff and Bath I saw that there was one demob sailor left on the platform, his grubby white sea-sack standing by his side and a khaki rucksack draped over his shoulder. There was no-one else left on the platform. No women, just him. As I turned to go I wondered if he was expecting someone to meet him and it was only just dawning on him that when his wife sent him that letter, she really meant it. What disappointments must there have been, Reg? On both sides. Those women who rushed into marriages at the war’s start now found they were living with strangers and, in a lot of cases, strangers they didn’t particularly like. I’d see them in the town, walking around the shops, ignoring one another. And there were quite a few cases of women getting a pasting from the men who believed they had been playing fast and loose while they were away. Well, you’d know that wouldn’t you, Reg? I suppose you probably helped to dispatch one or two of those who overdid it and killed their wives.