ISLANDS
I like islands. Islands that are poor like Cuba and Newfoundland. Because I’m not rich. The islands that attract the rich I’m less interested in—the island of Britain, for instance, where I’m standing now, which is twice the size of the island of Newfoundland. Some islands lose their island quality—Manhattan, even though Manhattan is only a thousandth the size of Newfoundland. And yet most islands keep the essential parts that made them: a shoreline and density. What is called a littoral zone.
My father told me, when I was a child, of an island in Newfoundland called Glover Island. Glover Island is the same size as Manhattan. He’d pointed to it down the lake where our log cabin is. He had been to Glover Island once; it had rescued him, when an open boat he was in capsized. He had been moose hunting and the lake is a hundred miles long. The lake lies along the axis of the prevailing wind, as though the wind had made the lake. But the island and lake are built within a fault line that runs along the Appalachian mountains of Newfoundland. The fault disappears under the Atlantic Ocean and emerges again dividing the Hebrides in Scotland. There’s a pond on Glover Island, my father said to me, and on that pond there’s an island. Someday I’d like to spend a night on that island on a pond on an island in a lake on an island in the ocean.
I remembered lifting up over Toronto in the dark and noticing the other side of Lake Ontario. The lake does not look that big. In fact, I had wondered if what I was seeing were the islands that are very near the Toronto shoreline. I could understand the coastline down to Hamilton and then around to the American side of the lake. As the plane ascended, it was difficult to gauge how small things were becoming. This was similar to my experience of Stonehenge. How big is it? The roped-off area did not allow you to get close enough to tell.
I slept well in the bottom bunk, with my sleeping mask and earplugs. I sank deep into the mythical embroidery of an old war. The window was open about four inches. Three pairs of bunks, six men. Some Germans. Civil. And the bunk was long enough for me.
Very early the next morning, the Americans immediately jumped to the floor and began their pushups. Breakfast cost five pounds for buffet egg, sausage, bacon, beans, mushrooms, tomato, toast, cereal, and coffee. I made a toasted cheese and ham sandwich to take with me on the train. On the way to the station I bought a flat cap at the Barbour shop—made by Deerhunter in Denmark. It was a dark olive, and the only one that fitted me well. I tried on some of the larger Bond caps that men wore a hundred years ago but I looked too ridiculous—as if I was trying intentionally to enter the past. There were no English caps of the right colour or weight.
The Newfoundlanders, if they had money, bought new outfits that looked like officers’ uniforms with big flat pockets. They did this in London, on their way north to train in Scotland.
A DISTURBANCE MADE OUT OF OMISSION
I took the train out of Salisbury and awaited a change at Southampton. This was the port where the Titanic had left England. It was where many soldiers had left to join the wars in Turkey and France. And where many troops returned to English hospitals, wounded.
But I was heading north. The flat lands and rises I saw through the train window were interrupted by little clusters of trees on hills—the disturbance the result of farmers cultivating the land and leaving the trees. So it was the smooth flatness that was deliberately created, and a disturbance made out of omission.
The Lancashire man back at the hostel had told me he had to work on Monday. I’ll take a train with my bike to London and then back to Lancashire, he’d said. One of the Americans who had been doing pushups explained to the Germans that at his school a German student always won the scholarship in history, even speaking English as a second language. Imagine, he said, an American studying in Germany and pulling that off.
The Germans, someone else said, had lost the semi-final in the Euro Cup last night, 2–1 to Italy.
I opened my eyes and saw a sign with the word “alight”: Alight here for Mottisfont Abbey.
The ticket collector woke me while he inspected a fallen perforated gate over a fluorescent light tube near my seat. That’s a fitter’s job, actually, he said aloud but to himself.
Fitter’s job. Such English words!
Each car on the train had two surveillance globes on the ceiling, one at each end. The signs that indicated the presence of recording devices had an outdated image of a camera; symbols have not kept up with the objects they represent.
I dozed while tall earthen banks with clusters of thick bushes zipped by the train window. Even on flats, trees blocked the view. Which meant people in their homes didn’t have to see this train—but no one thinks of the needs of a train passenger. I required intimate views into kitchens and bedrooms for a fleeting second, so I could stitch these fractions of action together and form a country.
A trolley of coffee; this perked me up. The platforms at the stations where we stopped were sheltered by peaked corrugated roofs and it was difficult to see your connection because there were so many trains. Passengers who annoyed me: whistling and humming to music in their earphones, a man with a fluorescent orange bag who planted it in the aisle, people with cell phones that rang loudly with old-fashioned rings or mash-up reggae.
The public toilets cost thirty pence. You had to feed the coins into a turnstile. London Victoria was a lovely station, with the light coming through the arced ceiling. During the war, this had been the terminus for many trains arriving from France with the wounded. It was wonderful now to leave the train for awhile and walk along streets that had such permanence in their markings. You couldn’t create this in a climate where snowploughs scoured the surface of roads. And I wondered, Did it make people here any closer to their history than we were in Canada?
See you later.
Yeah, take it easy.
This was the exchange between two young men on the train, their hair shorn like sheep. This was how men communicated at Ramsey East station. Departing, ready for service.
FORT GEORGE
It was a long day’s travel climbing up the entire body of England and, finally, into Scotland. The Newfoundlanders had loved this landscape. The beauty of the little packages of farming and the thatched roofs, the mild weather. It all seemed so tame and without constant toil and hardscrabble effort. My train had passed, in the distance, my own birthplace of Newcastle. I have visited there, and considered the other life I could have lived if my parents hadn’t moved to Newfoundland. My parents had some great-uncles who were in the First World War. They came back not quite right in the head, my father said, and they didn’t talk about it. My father, as a boy, chopped splits for kindling and sold the bundles, on a cart, to the neighbours. He had trouble tying the bundles. An older man next door showed him how to do it. You take out a few sticks then tie up the rest and then shove the sticks back in. The man had been in the war. It was as if he was applying his own experience of what ties a bundle of men together. There is footage of the Tyneside Irish descending across no man’s land on the first of July. Their movements are the same as the ones ascribed to the Newfoundlanders: marching with purpose over an open area. The soldiers of the Newfoundland Regiment thought, like those soldiers from Newcastle, that they were going to war in France. The Newfoundlanders had landed in Devonport, trained at Salisbury, found the conditions inhumane—there was twice the average rainfall that year—and finally were sent to Fort George near Inverness. The weather was better at least, and they were away from the Canadians.
Their train took them north past Birmingham to Ardersier, which is near Inverness. An old fishing village. They moved into barracks at Fort George and had, for the first time, real beds to sleep in. They had milk in their tea and butter on their bread, one Blue Puttee wrote. The commanding officer’s horse stopped in front of a tea house every morning to receive his lump of sugar. Once, they went to a dance in Inverness, and near curfew, Frank Lind and a few other Blue Puttees jumped aboard a biplane and flew back to barracks in five minutes. It is very e
xciting whizzing through the air at such an awful speed.
The regiment’s first death happened here at Fort George. It was Christmas. Parcels from home had arrived and continued to be delivered all through the season. The soldiers cut large biscuit tins down to make pans for cooking goose. The men had an excellent Christmas dinner: goose and roast beef, cabbage, potatoes, turnips and then plum pudding and tea. They opened presents and ten cases of cakes from the Daughters of the Empire. At New Year’s, “sixty-seven barrels and thirty-eight cases of Christmas presents reached the Regiment from the Women’s Patriotic Association.” One Blue Puttee, fifty years later, said, of the bounty of cake: You couldn’t escape it.
Jack Chaplin was the first to die. In his military records it notes “abdominal disease.” He died at Fort George on the first day of 1915. He was buried there in the small town of Ardersier:
JUST IN THE MORNING OF HIS DAY
IN YOUTH AND LOVE HE DIED
He was eighteen.
The men trained at Fort George for another ten weeks. And then, in February, they heard that another contingent of men was on its way to join them from St John’s: C Company. So they were on the move again, to be stationed in Edinburgh—the only non-Scottish troops to ever garrison Edinburgh Castle.
THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN
There was a painting I had to see in Edinburgh. The Monarch of the Glen portrays a glorious full-bodied elk, catching a whiff of the viewer, while in a misty background the purple crags of Scotland appear to be cooling after recent formation. It was painted in 1851 by Edwin Landseer. It’s a famous painting and has been called the ultimate biscuit-tin image of Scotland. Artists like Peter Blake and Peter Saville have reworked the original image, saturating the colours and, eventually, collaborating with textile workers to create a tapestry of the same elk and landscape. The tapestry is stunning for the feeling you get: that you are looking at a digital work. But up close, you see the elk is a fabric composed of threads. The scene portrays what is often the subject matter in a traditional wall hanging: the hunting scene. Jonathan Cleaver, one of the weavers who collaborated with Blake and Saville, said that patience is not something he thinks of when he’s weaving. If you’re being patient you’re waiting for something to happen. When you’re weaving, you’re making something happen with every movement of your hands.
Why was I struck with these reworkings of an old romantic image? Because I am dealing with the same trouble of sifting through an old war to find new meaning. It is not enough to reproduce the classic image of a nation and of the hunt. And this Scottish elk was the basis for a famous Newfoundland photo of a caribou called Monarch of the Topsails by Simeon Parsons. That Parsons image, from the 1890s, became the biscuit-tin image for Purity Biscuits, a Newfoundland company. And the caribou was adopted as the emblem for the Newfoundland Regiment. The five memorial caribou that stand in France and Belgium are based on this Parsons photograph. So I had to see this original painting, and then find the textile version at Dovecot Studios.
A note by one of the curators mentions Derrida’s description of writing as weaving, that textile and text have the same etymology. We have all seen people, I thought, in the cemeteries, running their hands over words. Receiving the texture of that name—perhaps a family name—directly into their bodies.
The Landseer painting was on loan from Diageo, which is a drinks business that owns Bushmills and Johnnie Walker and Captain Morgan and Seagram’s. Diageo had exited their food interests, selling off Burger King and Pillsbury. Peter Blake’s appropriation of the Landseer stag, called After “The Monarch of the Glen” by Sir Edwin Landseer, was painted in the mid-1960s for Paul McCartney’s dining room. Blake then designed the Sgt Pepper album cover.
I studied my walking map and admired the castle above me. The weather was poor, but not as bad as what the men experienced: a foot of snow fell on them during one blizzard. I simply wished I had an umbrella.
My mother once gave me a ruby umbrella handle made of bakelite. She said it was the only ornament in her house when she was growing up. It had been her grandmother’s umbrella, and so that handle had existed during the First World War; it had existed at the end of a functioning umbrella. The other thing my mother gave me was a glass paperweight with a photo-backing of the Scottish war memorial. We have some relatives in there, she said.
I thought she meant some of my Scottish kin—Hardys and Pippetts—had been killed in the war and buried in the memorial. Under the stone floor, like the poets of England at Westminster Abbey. All three Hardys in the Newfoundland Regiment had been killed in the war.
But now I saw that the Scottish war memorial here at Edinburgh Castle was created in 1927. The names of the dead who fought with Scottish regiments were listed on a scroll inside a box in this memorial. So I realized my kin had their names in a box here. The biscuit-tin interior of Scotland.
GRETNA GREEN
Let’s tally up the days here: a month in St John’s, ten days at sea, two months at Salisbury, another two at Inverness, three months in Edinburgh. Every day the men waited for word that they were being shipped to France. The route-marches and training were repetitive and boring. There was talk of an uprising in Ireland, of a politician—Roger Casement—who had been traitorous, and there was some suggestion of sending the Newfoundlanders to Belfast. Eventually, the men realized that the British weren’t expecting the Newfoundlanders to go anywhere, were only expecting them to replace the British soldiers who were keeping the homeland safe.
But then an event happened at Gretna Green, which is near the English border with Scotland. I stopped outside a train station in Gretna Green—Hadrian’s Wall is down the road, the wall that runs across the top of England to the city I was born in, Newcastle, where my parents met and were married. Gretna Green is famous for runaway weddings—centuries of young English couples eloping to the Scottish border and being married by blacksmiths. But it was too early in the day to happen upon anyone involved in a romantic marriage outside of England. Across the rolling hills here, you could see an elopement for miles.
In Gretna Green there was a monument to a train disaster that had happened in May of 1915. It was an event that changed the fortunes of the Newfoundlanders and it was the reason I was here. Three trains, fully loaded with passengers and fuel, collided and a fire ripped through the wooden trains, ignited by the gas lamps used for lighting. Many passengers were burned alive. “The dead bodies lie in a white farm building near the railway and in a little hall in Gretna.”
One of the trains carried two companies of the Royal Scots from the 52nd Lowland Division. Three officers and 207 men were killed. Five officers and 219 other ranks were injured. It remains the worst rail disaster in British history—the Titanic of train wrecks.
The Royal Scots were part of the 29th Division. They were on their way to Gallipoli.
For several months after, this gap in the 29th Division remained. And then, in August 1915, Lord Kitchener arrived to inspect the troops in Edinburgh. Over twenty thousand soldiers were present, but Kitchener addressed the Newfoundlanders. You, he said, are the men we need for Gallipoli.
HAWICK AND ALDERSHOT
The soldiers were vaccinated and met up with C Company and heard stories from home from the recruits. They felt that C Company had received “the soft end of the plank.” Then the regiment moved back into tents at Stob’s Camp, near Hawick, and the men attended dances in this small town. James Paris Lee, the man who invented the Lee-Enfield rifle, was born here in Hawick. One man was found absent without leave, selling coal from a cart. He was wearing a bowler hat. The camp was low key after Edinburgh—a half-dozen sheep wandered around the tents. A detention camp next to Stob’s Camp contained ten thousand German prisoners. The Newfoundlanders did route-marches and one of the men made a movie of their march, which they watched the next night at the picture palace in Hawick. There was a rumour that Turkey was about to withdraw from the war. That Germany was using poison gas. The men killed and ate twenty rabbits.
Hawick’s war memorial in Wilton Park has been a winner of the best-kept memorial competition: a naked figure of youth by A. J. Leslie. In its day, it caused some controversy.
It was here the regiment was divided, the men split into two groups: those heading to Aldershot for a final “polish” before being sent overseas; while the remainder—mostly the recruits—were sent to their new depot at Ayr. At Aldershot the barracks were large, and there were great gymnasiums. There were dining rooms and rooms for playing billiards and rooms for borrowing books. There was a statue of the Duke of Wellington from Hyde Park, and Caesar’s camp was nearby. The British built their airplanes here. The soldiers were told that Alfred the Great had fortified himself here eleven hundred years ago.
Dr Arthur Wakefield gave the men a lecture on how to use the gas helmet recently invented by Cluny Macpherson. The men turned in their thick-woven uniforms for lighter outfits and a St John’s man with a camera made a movie of the men taking bayonet practice. Lord Kitchener spoke to the men about the Dardanelles and the King inspected the troops and then they took a train to Devonport and sailed, on a beautiful August day, aboard the Megantic straight to Mudros, on the island of Lemnos east of Greece and very near Turkey. They were guided by two torpedo destroyers. Then they backtracked to Egypt where they trained near Cairo and rode camels and learned to wear tin hats and took pictures of themselves with the pyramids. They slept on stone floors and then moved into tents.
And meanwhile, the remnants of the battalion moved to Ayr, Scotland.
AYR
When I got off the train in Ayr, I found that the land was similar to the land back home. The Great Glen Fault, a hundred miles north of Ayr, was the same strike-slip that cuts through the Long Range Mountains from White Bay, Newfoundland—the Cabot Fault. It is what makes the long lake with the island and the pond on that island and the island on that pond that my father told me about. The fault was broken up by the mid-Atlantic ridge formed two hundred million years ago.
Into the Blizzard Page 5