Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel)

by B A Lightfoot

  By midday they had pushed through to the crossroads in the centre of Bucquoy where the Germans held a strong position. A pole carrying the power lines hovered like a crucifix over the tattered remnants of what had been a large gate guarding the entrance to a farm. Two huge stone gate posts with a plank slung perilously between them now flanked the littered entrance through the crumbled remains of a farm wall. Facing it on the adjacent corner stood the shattered remains of a French family’s home. Half the house had been blown away revealing dusty, muslin drapes hanging listlessly over where the bed had stood. Splintered floorboards and the rubble of the walls were scattered around the garden alongside oil lamps, cushions and battered pots and pans. A large oak table and two spindle back chairs stood in the remains of the kitchen where a peeling, green wooden shelf swung on one retaining screw.

  Down the street a solitary chair stood outside a door, its occupant long since gone, and across the road a ladder, serving a now forgotten purpose, leant into an upstairs window. Beyond the ladder, a German army motorbike stood against the house wall and the front of an armoured vehicle protruded out from a side street.

  The Lancashire soldiers knew that, although there was no sign of them, the Germans were well embedded in the village and it would need a major effort to remove them. But the British army had gained enormous experience of fighting outside of the confining trenches and they also felt that they were fighting an increasingly demoralised enemy. The Germans had suffered massive losses in the last two weeks since they had launched their major attack to break the stalemate. Their assault had now faltered and their troops were being repelled. Most importantly, the Germans also knew that the Americans were moving troops into the Western Front giving the Allies a huge reserve of manpower to face a nation whose stock was being rapidly depleted.

  The Lancashire men were deployed and the attack was launched but the response from the Germans was fierce. They inflicted heavy damage on the Salford Battalion with their strategically placed machine gun posts but the Lancashire soldiers slowly ground away their advantage with ferocious hand-to-hand fighting. Two platoons of the 5th Lancashires were brought up to lend support and yard-by-yard the village was repossessed.

  For eight hours the fighting continued relentlessly and by the evening of the 5 April a line was gained and held and the fighting gradually came to a halt. With the red glow of the setting sun behind them mockingly turning the whole area into a semblance of a dying furnace, the smoke from still burning houses lending their grudging support to the illusion, the British soldiers collected the dead and wounded. They gave the same respect to the German corpses as they did to their own, except to occasionally relieve them of their unwanted boots, daggers and badges.

  The German campaign had started to weaken. Under mounting pressure at home and growing unrest in their army, they had launched a massive attack to break the Allied resistance. Their Commanders had dreamt of marching triumphantly into Paris and subjugating the French nation and its colonies. They had failed.

  ***

  Edward and Big Charlie hobbled back into the village giving each other mutual support. They were returning from the advanced dressings station after having their wounds treated. Big Charlie was shouldering Edward’s rucksack as well as his own because Edward had a sprained shoulder and a cut forearm. Big Charlie was using Edward’s other shoulder as a support because he had a badly gashed calf muscle.

  Big Charlie was muttering about the ‘bleeding iodine’ and his conviction that the medics applied it so liberally just for a laugh. Edward’s eyes were darting everywhere as he sought the whereabouts of Liam. He had seen his friend earlier whilst he had been waiting with Big Charlie in the minor wounds queue. Liam had been having a head wound attended to but he had since disappeared.

  They asked many people if they had seen him until eventually somebody remembered ‘the little fella with his head bandaged up’ and pointed in the direction of the crossroads. Edward found Liam huddled down in the kitchen of the derelict house, his rifle propped between his legs, the clean bandage on his head contrasting starkly with his dishevelled and torn uniform, now covered in dried mud and dust. He had pushed his helmet back and was picking dried blood off the hair that was protruding from beneath the bandage. A tear had scoured a clean path down his dusty cheek and he stared fixedly at a photograph of the family that had lived there, still hanging on a nail on the opposite wall.

  The two men sat down at either side of him and Edward looked at the photograph. There were three generations of the family posing in their best outfits. Grandma and Grandad sat proudly in the centre with a grandchild on each knee. At their side was a young teenage girl and behind the grandparents were the Mother, holding a baby, and the Father – both in their late thirties. The sepia coloured print showed a family who were proud of their standing in the village and enjoyed some minor affluence as the owners of the village shop that they now posed in front of. Staring at the photograph, Edward realised that the building in the picture was the one that they were now sitting in but the whole of the front had been blown away by a shell.

  In a shaft of the fading sunlight a dust cloud hovered in wraiths over the three men like the fretful spirits of past owners. A small bird bounced inquisitively along the shelf of an oak dresser. Edward shuddered as he saw a green chenille tablecloth, like the one that they had at home, discarded carelessly in the corner.

  He tried to interpret his friend’s distant thoughts as they stared at the photograph. ‘I expect that they managed to escape before the Germans came, but there won’t be much left to come back to.’

  ‘Aye,’ Liam replied abruptly.

  ‘He’s probably in the army somewhere,’ Edward tried again ‘but the old man looks fit enough to have got things sorted out for the rest of the family.’

  ‘Aye, maybe.’

  ‘She looks a bit like your Brig,’ Big Charlie said, cutting incisively to Liam’s troubling thoughts. ‘She looks tough enough to look after them all.’

  Liam glanced up at his big friend. ‘I’m not going back,’ he said.

  They looked at him, astonished. ‘You’re not going back where?’ Edward finally asked.

  ‘I’m not going back home, to Brig and the kids.’ The words were eked painfully out of his strained throat.

  Big Charlie’s wide eyes quizzed the little man and his mouth opened and closed as he sought the words that would formulate his concern at this outrageous statement. Finally he spluttered, ‘Are you going barmy or summat? Has that cut damaged your brain?’

  ‘No, it bloody hasn’t.’

  ‘Then why are you coming out with stupid bloody remarks like that then?’

  Liam’s lips clamped tightly together. Big Charlie’s insensitive approach had driven him back into his hunched-up, glowering contemplation of the photograph.

  ‘She needs you, mate,’ Edward said quietly. ‘That’s what is keeping her going – waiting for you to come back.’

  ‘She’s waiting for the person that left four years ago. And I’m not him.’

  ‘None of us are, Liam,’ Edward said, reflecting the words that Liam had said to him a year before. ‘We’ve all changed. But we’ve done what we’ve had to do and we’ve done it for them – to give them a proper life.’

  Liam was incensed by Edward’s glib assertion. ‘What proper life is that? Scrimping and scraping to make ends meet so that people like that Major sodding Gobshite can live a life of luxury and Jimmy Pearce’s widow will be skivvying for Gobshite’s wife? Does that bastard care when your kids are ill and you can’t afford to get the doctor? Will he be full of charity for the poor sods who’ve had their legs blown off when they can’t afford their rent? No bloody chance.’

  ‘Aye, you’re right’ Edward said appeasingly. ‘There’s a lot going to have to change after all this is over. But it’s not going to solve anything just walking out on our families.’

  Liam leant back on to the wall, his eyes closed. ‘I’m sorry, Eddie. It’s not what I
was meaning. I’m not walking out on them. I just can’t go back to Brig.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, mate’ Edward said, slightly exasperated. ‘But I seem to be missing the point here. What else is that if it’s not walking out on her?’

  Liam was quiet for a long time before he pushed himself forward and got to his feet. He stood in front of his two friends and his hands clenched as he said fiercely, ‘It’s those bloody kids. Did you look in the eyes of those Germans today? Some of them were not much older than our kids at home. They were scared bloody stiff. They’ve got Mams at home who are fearing for their sons. Mams like Brig and Laura.’

  A breeze was rustling the leaves of some old magazines that were on the floor and Edward felt a cold chill settle on him. ‘It’s the same as before though, Liam. Most of them don’t want to be there but, now they are, they are out to kill us. It’s dog eat dog in this situation.’

  ‘I know that. But it’s made me realise just how low I’ve sunk. We’re worse than animals. You block it out so that you can get through but I feel dirty now. We’re putting bayonets through fifteen and sixteen year old kids. That makes us worse than the rats in the trenches. I could never look Brig in the eye again. I could never bear to even touch her again for fear I would contaminate her. Do you think that she would respect me if I told her that we had been killing young boys, but I did it for her? She would despise me.’

  Edward felt helpless to respond to his friend’s arguments. Big Charlie sucked in his lips and frowned. ‘I can’t see that about the rats. Foxes maybe,’ he said. ‘Foxes just kill for the sake of it.’

  The other two stared at him in astonishment. ‘Since when did you become an expert on wildlife, then?’ queried Edward.

  ‘They used to come on my Grandad’s allotment. They’d kill the chickens and then just leave them there,’ Big Charlie responded.

  ‘So I should say that I feel worse than the foxes in the field then?’ Liam questioned, frustrated by this distraction.

  ‘Well, maybe. The difference is that we are doing what we are just to survive but foxes don’t. They do it because they are mischievous little sods and they’ll keep at it until somebody shoots them.’

  ‘Well it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a fox or a rat,’ Liam said, returning to his enveloping gloom. ‘Brig wouldn’t want either of them in her house, never mind in her bed.’

  ‘Your Brig is not daft, you know. She knows what’s going on and she’s tougher than you think sometimes,’ Big Charlie rejoined. ‘I remember when she was a kid and she battered a lad in our street who was bullying her young brother. Clouted me once, as well, when I pinched some of her chips. She knows what’s going on out here, like they all do. If she’d have been asked she would have been out here with the rest of us.’

  He sat back suddenly, exhausted by his lengthy diatribe. A faint smile crept across Edward’s face. He had not heard the big man speak for so long since Liam had knocked a crib board over in The Railway when Charlie had been holding two sevens and two eights and a seven had been turned up. He also remembered the fearsome punch that Bridget Gallagher had thrown at Big Charlie and it wasn’t just her chips that he had been trying to pinch. Big Charlie had told his mother that it had been an Irish hooligan that had given him the black eye.

  Liam shrugged, picked up his gear and walked out.

  ***

  29 Myrtle Street

  Cross Lane

  Salford 5

  Great Britain

  24th March 1918

  Dear Dad,

  Thank you for your ‘Happy Christmas’ but it wasn’t so good this year. We had a chicken off Uncle Jim’s allotment and we were lucky to get that because two of them had already been pinched by the time it came to Christmas. Mam said that geese are only for rich people these days. Uncle Jim has been growing lots of potatoes like the government has been asking you to do and Mam said that he is good at it because his grandad was Irish. I told our teacher and she said that it is not good to depend on one thing because a lot of Irish people starved to death when they had a potato famine and that was because the crops caught a blight. I think that Mr Harrison in the next street must have this disease because I heard Mrs Harrison telling the woman next door that her Ernie had blighted her life.

  A boy called Jimmy from the Mission was birched by the police last week for stealing from a shop. Mam said it is wrong to steal but the kids are starving and she bets that the magistrate is being fed well enough. Jimmy said that he was lucky because one of the other lads was put in the navy and sent to sea. I think, though, that he might at least get well fed and he will see lots of places around the World.

  Round here, you’re alright if your Dad works on the docks because they didn’t go in the army and the girls at school say that their Dads are always finding things lying around on the docks that they bring home. But for everybody else, you have to rely on granddads and older uncles else you’ve had it. I think that is why Jimmy was pinching stuff, because his Grandad is dead and his Dad has gone missing somewhere and now his Mam is ill.

  Dad, when is this war going to finish? It’s not fair.

  I have heard of Mrs Pankhurst but Mam says that she is working with the government now to beat the Germans. Mam said that they’ve all got a shock coming to them when the war is over because the men will come home wanting their jobs back but the women won’t want to be pushed down again. It’s nearly all women conductors on the trams now and everybody says that they do a good job, so why should they be pushed out of them? At least they smile at you and they don’t snot their noses on the floor like some of the men because the women take the trouble to carry handkerchiefs.

  Our Sadie is good at reading now and she is helping our Mary. Our Ben got the cane at school last week for kicking a football through a window. He said that he hadn’t been playing football and he was only hiding in the cupboard to stay out of the way.

  I didn’t really understand ‘Little Women’ but our teacher was pleased because I showed an interest. I am reading a book about the Romans at the moment but the people sound so boring. Why don’t they have interesting books for children?

  Those socks were blissful when the weather was really cold so I hope that you don’t mind that I had them instead of you.

  Love

  Laura

  ***

  Big Charlie’s face was contorted by a series of deep furrows which ran from the screwed up contemplative forehead down to the pursed lips. He was staring at the letter that he had received that morning and at regular intervals his shoulders rose up and he emitted a deep thoughtful sigh. He sat on an empty ammunition container outside the dug out with his elbows resting on his broad knees. His brown hair was stuck up in unruly spikes where he kept ruffling it as if trying to stimulate some mental activity that was so far eluding him.

  Edward and Liam watched their friend’s agitation with increasing apprehension. Liam was clearly anxious to probe further and repeatedly made to start the questions that were burning him. It was clear, though, from Big Charlie’s distant demeanour that he would not be subjected to interrogation and Liam’s questions hung unspoken in the air.

  Eventually he stuffed the letter into his top pocket and reached down for his rifle and his cleaning kit. He spent the next half hour meticulously cleaning and polishing the weapon whilst his friends indulged a favourite pastime of recounting childhood memories in the hope of gaining the interested participation of Big Charlie.

  ‘Do you remember that time when Tommy Ten Pints came out of the Craven Heifer and he walked straight off the flags and into the cart road?’ asked Edward.

  ‘Do you mean when he didn’t see that horse until it bumped into him and he turned round and smacked it on the nose?’ Liam rejoined.

  ‘Aye, that’s it. And the carter tried to crack Tommy with his whip and instead he lashed the horse across its face.’

  ‘Yeah. Next minute the horse was up on its back legs and all the crates came rolling off the cart,’ Li
am enthused.

  ‘I’ve never seen so many oranges in my life before. All rolling down Cross Lane trying to escape’ Edward recalled.

  ‘Aye. You had to feel a bit sorry for the carter, though. The poor sod was trying to pick up his oranges and hold on to the reins at the same time.’

  ‘It didn’t turn out too bad though,’ chuckled Edward. ‘We had orange butties for our tea that night.’

  The disinterested Big Charlie remained unmoved. Completing his cleaning, he placed the rifle on one side and folded his cloths. He took a sip of the tea that had been poured into his chipped enamel cup and resumed his contemplation of the letter.

  Suddenly, he stood up and walked over to Liam, handing him the letter. ‘Here. Have a look at that. Looks as though we’re both going nowhere. Only difference is you’ve got a choice.’

  Liam read the letter then passed it over to Edward without comment. Edward looked at the plain white sheet on which faint pencil lines had been ruled. Along these a neat, feminine script delivered a slightly confusing message with a fairly direct end.

  Dear Charlie,

  You big, daft, stupid man. You make me the laughing stock of all the neighbours and then you have the nerve to send me a letter as though it’s from a solicitor. It’s not me that has done anything wrong – it’s you who threw that poor Mr Snelgrove into the horse trough. Now I have had to leave the Glee Club because I couldn’t bear the humiliation and I will never again be able to enjoy the humbling reward of the ripple of applause in appreciation of my small talents.

  I have never asked much of you, Charlie. I’ve fetched and carried for you and always made sure that you have had a hot meal on the table when you came in and clean underpants in the drawer. If that is not enough to show that I love you then what is?

  But what thanks do I get for that? What do I get in return? Somebody who comes barging in like a madman and, without a by your leave, assaults a paying guest, a man of great musical talent and a gentle disposition.