Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  ‘I’d worked it all out carefully,’ he said, with an air of bewilderment, as though he’d discovered someone cheating against him somewhere. ‘My nipper’s growing fast. He’s fourteen now and well able to do things about the house that I do. He could look after his mother. There was no excuse for me not joining up. And now they don’t damn’ well want me!’

  ‘Cheer up, Hardy,’ I said, trying to calm him down. ‘You’ll be here pushing a pen when the rest of us are pushing up the daisies.’

  He turned away, avoiding me. ‘They didn’t want me,’ he said. ‘They said my feet weren’t quite up to scratch. Dicehart was the same.’

  He turned back to the desk and started poking with a fretful indifference at the newspapers around him, pushing them away in little jerky frustrated movements until he’d cleared a space on the untidy desk in front of him. He made no effort to work, though, and sat staring at the cleared patch of desk with a haggard expression as though he’d lost all interest in life.

  Lockwood Haddo was sitting at the Chief Reporter’s desk in Ashton’s place, and I saw him watching Hardacre with interest. Although he was only a bit older than I was, Locky was a dedicated journalist who’d worked in London for several years and come back north to be Ashton’s deputy. I loved Locky. He’d taught me all I knew and made me feel like an awkward colt most of the time with his air of knowledge, good sense and imperturbability. For ages on and off I’d been in love with his sister Helen.

  Now he sat watching Hardacre with a wry sympathetic smile on his mouth, his lean, sensitive face half-turned towards the telephone receiver he held in his right hand.

  ‘Cheer up, Hardy,’ he said. ‘There’ll be plenty of others. We don’t all suffer from the same epic masculinity as this lot, thank God.’

  ‘I’m glad I’m in, anyway,’ Mason said loudly, and Locky glanced at him with a hint of reproach in his eyes that he could be so gleeful in front of the suffering Hardacre.

  ‘In your Homeric craving for martial glory,’ he pointed out, ‘has it ever occurred to you that soldiers in wartime are sometimes rather summarily done to death?’

  It made me feel schoolboyish and naïve, and his air of tranquillity of spirit made me wonder if I’d been a little hysterical.

  Frank was unperturbed, however, and Hardacre was beyond consolation. He slung the evening paper across to me, and jabbed a long flat finger at a paragraph on the main news page under a thirty-point head.

  ‘They’ve estimated they’ll be under strength,’ he said, bitterly. ‘They’re reckoning on thirty per cent of those who signed not being completely A.1. That’s me. Not completely A.1. My God!’

  I picked up the paper. There was an interview by old FitzJimmy there, jammed into the left-hand column.

  We consider, he’d said, that, with the men we have to choose from, it is pointless selecting any but the very best – and I mean the very best in intelligence, physique and bearing. Doubtless there’ll be a chance for those whom we have rejected to serve in other capacities and other battalions, but this battalion is to represent this city and it must have only the very best material in every possible way.

  I felt flattered that I’d been included, but I knew what it meant to Hardacre. He had to face the fact for the rest of his life that he was only second-best and perhaps not even that.

  It was while I was putting the paper down, still wondering what to say to him that might make it a little easier to bear, that the door slammed open, swinging back with a crash against the desk, and young Murray burst in.

  He was only seventeen, the youngest in the office and the one who got all the dirty uninteresting jobs to do, all the waiting in the rain, and all the church and chapel paragraphs. I’d last seen him arguing the toss on the Town Hall steps with an adamant police sergeant who was trying to send him home, almost weeping as he insisted to his disbelieving audience that he was old enough to join, his smooth rosy face indignant; his eyes alight with a sort of wild despair.

  He snatched his hat from its peg and swung round to face us.

  ‘They’ve got room for a few more,’ he shouted gaily. ‘They’ve slung out a few old duffers with knock-knees and squint-eyes and they’ll be under strength. I’ll manage it after all. That bloody policeman’s gone off duty now. We’re in, Meredith, we’re in!’

  He crammed his hat on his head and disappeared in the direction of the stairs, whooping wildly, and as the door slammed after him Locky looked up at Hardacre again.

  ‘Old duffer,’ Hardacre mourned. ‘Knock-knees! My God!’

  His voice was thin and his long face was sharp with bitterness in the sunshine that was streaming through the high glass windows that ran down one side of the Editorial Room.

  ‘There’ll be plenty of time, Hardy,’ I said. ‘There’ll be other battalions.’

  ‘Other battalions aren’t this one. This one was special.’

  Locky put down the telephone and reached for a sheet of paper.

  ‘It’ll be weeks before the office recovers from this damned war,’ he sighed. ‘Only God and Sir Edward Grey realise the damage the Germans have done.’

  2

  It had been an extraordinary summer, that summer of 1914, a summer I remembered with an unbearable nostalgia for years. There was no real rain from March onwards and the scorching sun brought on the plums, and the plums brought out the wasps, so that they found their way even into the office windows in the city centre, buzzing maddeningly against the glass in places where you didn’t ever expect to find wasps. I remember it as if it were yesterday, morning after morning after morning of it, when even the drab Post rooms were full of dusty gold and the summer hum of insects.

  For weeks before the war started I’d been subbing half-baked scare stories from the agencies of German bands concealing weapons in their instruments, and German waiters spying on gunsites and army installations around London in readiness for the invasion of England they’d been talking of for years.

  There were a lot of Germans in the country in those days, working in the hotels and pork shops, singing Schubert on the music-hall stages and sweating in their little round hats in the parks and through the dusty streets with their brass bands. Many of them had even married English girls and settled down, and their relatives were always over to visit them. We had quite a few of them in the city. Some of them had been in England for generations.

  Schemingers, for instance, the chemists in the High Street; Singer and Greene, who’d been Sänger and Gruhn only a few years before; Stahler, the German-Swiss who kept the Post office supplied with trays of tea. Nobody had noticed them until a few weeks before, then as the events on the Continent had blown up into a crisis old Singer had suddenly found it advisable to retire to Bournemouth and leave the business to Greene, who at least spoke King’s English, and hadn’t a houseful of blond bullet-headed children; and John Schafer, the owner of the big food store in the High Street, a man who’d lived all his life in England and couldn’t speak any other language, a man who’d given a fortune to the city in the form of art galleries and parks and property of various sorts, was booed in the street. It seems like prehistory now, as far away as the ancient Greeks, but it was all very real and exciting then.

  I hadn’t taken much notice when Franz Ferdinand and his wife were murdered in Sarajevo. No hint of the desperateness of the crisis seemed to leak into the papers. Ireland was much nearer and far more turbulent, and assassination was an occupational hazard for middle-European monarchies. Besides, what’s a Crown Prince or two to a young man sighing like a furnace over a girl, or absorbed with sport? You know how it is.

  Yorkshire’s position in the county-cricket table was a matter of great moment that summer, and I’d been occupied with Locky Haddo’s sister, Helen, for some time. We’d all met her first at an office party and she’d bowled me – and Frank Mason – clean over for a week or two. Since then, when Frank wasn’t claiming her, I’d seen her on and off, playing tennis, going to the cinema, walking on the moors, but
never getting very far with her. She was young, too lively and forthright to be dazzled, and not given to the kind of talk most girls favoured. But whenever I felt I was making headway with her, she’d turn to Frank, and the next trips we made together always seemed to end in arguments, with Helen laughing at me and me hating her like hell – till next time. She was small, fair, pretty enough to take your breath away, alert minded like Locky and with the same sharp sense of humour.

  For the most part Locky ignored us, or behaved like a cynical elder brother, never referring to Helen when I saw him at the office. His father was a doctor with a surgery on the Common and they never seemed to be short of money, which didn’t make it any easier for me, because my parents were dead and I was in digs and never had any money in my pocket. Things were cheap of course. Good cigarettes were ten for threepence and a suit cost you thirty bob. But I always felt a bit like a poor relation, for, if prices were low, wages weren’t so high either, and Frank Mason lived at home and had far more to spend than I had.

  The night the war started we were all there in the office, and I remember hearing the tick-tick-tick of the machines up the air shaft next door, and the shouts for messengers or for tea from the sub-editors.

  Ashton, the Chief Reporter, was at the telephone, sitting at the end of the room at a desk with a frosted-glass screen round the front to give him privacy – a pink, round-faced man with pince-nez glasses who looked like Mr Pickwick on his trip to Ipswich. He was a man of precise and exacting demands, inclined to get harassed under pressure. He hated ticking anyone off, and, instead, he just used to look at you when he was angry, his face wearing a hurt empty look that had the effect of making you feel as if you’d struck him. He leaned heavily on Locky Haddo, who at that moment was sitting opposite him, busy with the engagements diary, his lean face absorbed as he wrote.

  Frank Mason was reading the paper, his hat on the back of his head; Hardacre, his face long and cadaverous, was gloomily shoving with one hand at a plate of sardines on toast, on a tray that had been brought in for him from Stahlers’, while he wrote some copy with the other; Sainsbury, George Dicehart, from the Sports Department, and Arnold Holroyd were arguing about cricket with Barraclough, in from the Machine Room with a query. Only young Murray was missing, out somewhere in the loveliness of the evening, on the sort of unimportant query they always reserved for beginners like him.

  The city wasn’t as big then as it is now, but it was expanding rapidly and even if we didn’t think much of the possibility of war, the authorities at the Admiralty had had it well in mind for years and there was a great demand for guns for Jackie Fisher’s new Navy. The steelworks along Cotterside Common were working overtime, and had been for years, lighting the sky with their devilish colours all the way along the valley from the Dower Arches to Eccleston. They’d run trams out to Greenedge that spring and had just started a bus service to Ambleside, and the little streets of flat-fronted houses that were spoiling Cotterside were filling every scrap of open land round the chimneys and furnaces with their narrow-gutted ugliness, and every breath of fresh air that was left when the steelworks had finished with it with their streams of smoke.

  There was never much to recommend the city from the point of view of classic beauty. Smoke has a habit of clouding the vision as well as darkening the stone and sooting up the windows. It was just a place where guns were made and vast quantities of armour plate were churned out, where steel ingots, bars and strips were despatched through the sooty streets to other brighter cities that turned them into machinery.

  We had the finest smoke and grime in the north, the longest straightest narrowest streets of small houses in Yorkshire. They stood in acres, growing more crowded every day, surrounding the vast high-sided works where row on row of huge chimneys belched out multi-coloured smoke. Every road had its quota of pubs where steelworkers – scorched-cheeked, white-mufflered, blue-spectacled – went in all their off-shift hours to replace in beer the sweat they lost before the furnaces. Ours was a city of dark caverns lit with hellish lights, a city where the fresh green grass was always smutted by the smoke two weeks after spring came. It was a city of noise, of great steam-hammers and dark rolling-mills and clanking trainloads of rattling steel bars; of sturdy, stout-hearted people with worn faces lined with years of trying to keep their homes and their children clean in surroundings which made it much easier to be dirty.

  Nothing on God’s earth could ever make the place beautiful. Like its people, it was as forbidding as its numberless Methodist churches and Baptist chapels. Square, sombre, touched with grime, and depressing, but still oddly enduring.

  There wasn’t much to do that night, I remember. Most of what was going into the paper was coming in from Exchange Telegraph and the other agencies, and only the subs seemed to be busy. I remember the Deputy Chief Sub, who was in charge, had taken his collar off because of the heat and it lay on the desk beside him, still with his tie in it, stiff and shining and cold-looking, a bit like a disapproving snake. The rest of us were only pretending to work, smoking and waiting for things to happen, our minds too busy with national events to be concerned with local ones.

  I was reading the Evening Clarion. Officially, I was looking for district carry-over stories for the morning paper, but I was chiefly engaged in reading the war news. It had grown worse since Bank Holiday. Germany had stopped her noisy demand for a free passage for her armies through Belgium and had plunged ahead and invaded. Her columns were already on the borders of France. The headlines hit you in the eye like the announcement of a Second Coming:

  CONTINENT PLUNGED INTO WAR. GERMANS INVADE. BRITISH CABINET DECIDES TO SUPPORT FRANCE.

  In the next column, however, there was something that made you breathe easier. There, the world crisis had been reduced to local proportions. BLOW TO CITY, the headlines said. CONTINENTAL TRADE PARALYSED. BLACK OUTLOOK. In spite of the crowds round the food shops, it made you feel it wasn’t going to be any worse than a strike or a slump. And in between the announcements that the British Army was being mobilised, and the information from Sir Edward Grey that ‘we could not stand aside’, was Jack Hobbs’ 226 for Surrey at the Oval and the cheering news that at Old Trafford the traditional enemy, Lancashire, had collapsed and Yorkshire were heading for their ninth successive victory.

  I’d often wondered what I’d do if it came to a showdown, but I’d never thought seriously about it because I’d never really felt it would ever come to a war. Even now, what fear I felt was overlaid by an immense strange excitement. It was a new feeling, this imminence of war. We’d none of us in the office ever known it before. Most of us could only just remember the Boer War. We’d seen troops leave the city for South Africa, but not many; because the Boer War, by comparison with what was hovering over us at that moment, was a colonial skirmish or a Saturday-afternoon sporting event. But now, here we were, with something bigger and closer to home looming out of the shadows and likely to affect us all, something that reached out and personally touched London and Berlin and Paris and Brussels and St Petersburg in Russia, and had already snatched away with a startling immediacy what few troops were garrisoned in the city.

  The Territorial camps had been cancelled to keep the men on hand and youngsters were slipping away from their families to get their names down before they were discovered. Men were being moved urgently about the country in vast numbers, sailors to Scapa Flow, soldiers to the cross-Channel ports, recruits to the camps round Salisbury and Aldershot, and the railways were jammed with unexpected traffic.

  On the Continent travellers were rushing home, and in Berlin, where they were still cheering the regiments off to the front, old soldiers shouting ‘Nach Paris’ and ‘Nach Petersburg’ were toasting ‘Der Tag’ and singing ‘The Watch on the Rhine’ and ‘Deutschland über Alles’, and ‘Was Bläsen der Trompeten?’. The Unter Den Linden was full of barked orders and stiff phalanxes of spiked-helmeted men, in field grey now instead of the parade-ground Prussian blue, all kicking their feet up i
n a goosestep that seemed foreign and difficult and faintly ridiculous to British eyes.

  All day people had been out of their offices and shops, talking and staring blank-eyed at newspapers. The Government had long since sent an ultimatum to Berlin requesting that the German Army should evacuate Belgium by midnight, but, according to the Clarion, the Germans were ignoring it and continuing to pour forward. It was no wonder nobody could settle down to work.

  For a long time nobody spoke, then Mason shut his paper with a clash of stiff new sheets and we all looked up.

  ‘Sir Edward Grey,’ he said, and he sounded faintly aggrieved, ‘should have made our position clear, then the Germans wouldn’t have dared to move. They don’t want to fight us any more than we want to fight them. That’s obvious, so it’s all a bit barmy when you think about it.’

  Nobody said anything, chiefly because we agreed with him. Hardacre went on picking drably at his sardines, and Arnold Holroyd and Dicehart and Sainsbury had stopped the argument on cricket they’d been having. Ashton was holding the telephone receiver to his ear, not speaking, his attention on Mason. The sound of the machines below came up, noisily insistent, jarring against the brain, a thin scratchy clicking that seemed to go with Hardacre’s wilting sardines and the smell of dust that always pervaded the old building.

  ‘I think it’s nothing but a swizz.’ Mason folded up the paper with a methodical slowness, as though he were busy thinking of other things and the paper was only something to keep his hands occupied. ‘It’s a put-up job. The big steel combines started it to get everyone to spend money on arms. It’s the giddy limit. That’s what it is. Nobody wants it.’

  ‘The French do,’ Dicehart commented. ‘They’re itching to get back at the Prussians for 1870.’

  Hardacre looked up and gestured with one of Stahlers’ knives. ‘They say that when the banks reopen they’re not going to issue any more sovereigns,’ he said slowly. ‘They’re going to issue notes. One pound and ten bob.’