That They Might Lovely Be

by David Matthews

  ‘This is country living. It doesn’t do to be squeamish. Somehow, once the deed is done, you forget quite quickly that the carcass was almost a pet.’

  She led the way into the shed where the butchers were at work on the pig, which dangled from a hook in the rafter by its roped hind-legs. There was, Anstace noted, surprisingly little blood, just a spattering on the stone floor. And then she saw, to the left, the buckets full of the congealing, crimson ichor. It had been carefully collected. Mr. Snodgrass was being dismembered with considerable speed. Knives with slick, glinting blades of different shapes and angles were being deftly deployed to cut and joint and skin. The tidiness of the operation seemed disturbingly paradoxical to Anstace. The word ‘slaughter’ suggested brutality and violence but here was a craft, elegantly executed. She wondered whether there had even been any aggression in the initial dispatch of the animal.

  ‘Afternoon, miss,’ said the pig-man.

  ‘Miss Catchpool is a friend of mine from school,’ explained Delia. ‘She hasn’t seen a pig killed before.’

  ‘You missed the best bit,’ said the boy. ‘Unless you heard it. All the way to Faversham I reckon you’d have heard him. He was a kicker, this one was. Boss says don’t let ’em see the knives because pigs are clever animals—they see the knives and they know they’re not just being taken out of the sty for a bit of a stroll like.’

  ‘You button your lip and do what you’re supposed to,’ admonished Ferris, waving the blade in the air just in case his instructions needed a sharper emphasis. The boy returned to his work but he gave Anstace a sly, sideways grin as if he knew that she, like him, would relish the retelling.

  ‘Will you send the boy to me if you need more hot water?’ asked Delia. ‘I shall be in the scullery or thereabouts.’

  Delia left her apron hanging on a nail and, with Anstace at her side, crossed the yard back to the schoolhouse. The light was beginning to take on that heavier luminosity which only clear evenings in late autumn carry, as the low sun illuminates the smoke from the cottage fires. One side of the yard was already in shadow. The advancing darkness could almost be calibrated against the children’s hopscotch runes, painted onto the metalled surface, as it edged toward the house.

  ‘I shall put the kettle on,’ said Delia. ‘I forget when you said the motor would be taking you back to Canterbury.’

  ‘Oh there is plenty of time. It just seemed too good an opportunity to waste. They’re near-neighbours of my aunts and just happened to mention earlier in the week, when we met them in Canterbury, that they’d be driving this way.’

  Anstace paused. The butchering in the shed had disturbed her. She felt that she’d have preferred the killing of Mr. Snodgrass to have been accompanied by something more ferocious and passionate. Perhaps she ought to have encouraged the boy in his recounting; revelling in the deed would at least have given the victim more status.

  She had never experienced killing of this order and exposure to this tidy dispatch of a sentient beast now sat in disturbing juxtaposition to her imagination of what was going on over the Channel and what Hubert would have to do when his training was complete. Would he approach battle with the same deft competence as Ferris and his boy had dealt with the pig? It seemed horrible even to think such questions and it troubled her.

  Anstace did not know how to share this anxiety. Delia seemed utterly unmoved by the day’s killing. If anything, there was an edge of brazen defiance in her studied nonchalance as if to say, ‘You see! I told you what my country life was like. Now you know.’

  ‘What a business!’ said Anstace, lamely. Delia was not sure whether she meant the butchering of the pig or Hubert’s enlisting. She made her choice.

  ‘If one wants to eat pork, one has to accept responsibility for the death of a pig.’

  ‘Of course. I didn’t really mean…’

  I need to say something, thought Anstace, because, if I don’t, we’ll never get over this obstacle. She doesn’t want me here. Her mother doesn’t want me here. I’ve trespassed somehow and, if I can’t get over this awkwardness, Delia and I will have stepped apart from each other irrevocably. That’s how it feels. Is this another effect of war? Friends finding that they do not have the capacity to share the monumental weight of what is suddenly hurled at them? I simply do not know how to explain my dread—to share my fear—not that Hubert will be killed but that he will become a killer.

  The despatch of Mr. Snodgrass had simply ‘got in the way’. An awkward neighbour, calling at an inopportune moment with some minor grievance, can have a wholly disproportionate effect on the jolliest of family gatherings, turning everything sour and melancholy. The lightest of breezes, ruffling the lake’s glassy surface, can make a sumptuous picnic on a glorious summer’s day seem a frivolous extravagance. Sometimes it is the smallest factor which can tip the scales and then the whole balance of the world seems disturbed. For Anstace, this routine, domestic killing changed everything. She felt that she could not say anything about her fears for Hubert without Mr. Snodgrass’s pale carcass swinging into view. She wished Delia would broach the subject but perhaps she was haunted by the same spectre. The longer they avoided the only topic worth talking about the more impossible it became to grasp it. Instead, they batted it away with pointless chatter.

  By the time Ferris and his boy had been paid for their work and sent on their way, the tripe wrapped in a clean cloth for them as a present, Anstace and Delia were exhausted. Small talk had dribbled out of their friendship and drained it. Neither had had the courage to let silence wrap them. Their friendship had begun ordinarily enough as chattering school friends who find the same things ridiculous, scorn what is ‘lame’, and take simple pleasure in being in the other’s proximity. If there had been some tension or minor irritation or they found their moods to be incompatible, one or other of them would take herself off to do something else. Nothing would have been meant by it. Neither ever felt any resentment toward the other. What had served them well as school friends no longer seemed sufficiently robust as they ventured into adulthood. During the past year, in the company of Hubert and Geoffrey, the expanding boundaries of their experience had stretched the sinews of friendship. Neither had tested her own emotional integrity by explaining how she felt to her friend. Having always left such things for Miss Pumphrey’s Romantic poets to express, sharing intimate confidences now would be indulgent and awkwardly self-centred. Silence, however, felt inadequate and they had let trivial platitudes set the tone instead. And now it was too late. Anstace realized with a shock that, although she wanted to explore with Delia her feelings for Hubert, she lacked the courage to do so.

  Anstace’s aunts’ friends’ motor would collect her and, until it arrived, she could not leave. She was trapped at Dunchurch. She and Delia were compelled to endure each other’s company without the resources to manage it companionably. They might have been near-strangers in the way that light conversation rattled its brittle and utterly inconsequential patter in tune with the tinkling of silver on china.

  Mr. Snodgrass and Hubert were left trussed up and dangling in the air.

  Anstace was ready to weep at her own inadequacy. I don’t have the words. I don’t want to hand some limp description to Delia. I don’t want to risk weaving a fabrication out of the only threads I can find. It would be loose and rough, disintegrating under the lightest handling. I want something, instead, which will take the weight of Hubert’s decision, help him shoulder it and carry the implications of all that must follow. If I thought that Delia wanted the same, it might be easier.

  For her part, Delia simply wished she had the nerve to tell Anstace to leave, to start down the hill, if necessary, meeting the wretched motor on its way. Social convention stopped her from doing so. Expelling one’s friends from the house because one was tired of their company was simply not what one did. The alternative was to pirouette with the tea service forever and ever.

  At least, thought Delia, the longer we leave it, the less likely it is t
hat Anstace will say anything. I dread her ‘opening up’. She might expect me to reciprocate. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen? Confidences are offered and something of equal moment has to be shared. I do not want her to tell me what she feels about Hubert enlisting. I have no doubt she is worried and anxious (everyone is worried and anxious). I am sure that she’ll have heard lurid tales of the conditions in France and Belgium (who hasn’t?). She may want to lay claim to some special understanding she and Hubert have reached (she is welcome to it; it is none of my business) but it will count for very little compared to the claim of his family. How can it, when she has only known him since the summer? If she expects me to respond with some schoolgirl’s confession involving Geoffrey, she is very much mistaken. What Geoffrey means to me is for me alone. What he is doing is courageous and dangerous and I do not need Anstace to draw some connection and tell me that, if—one day—he pulls me out of the schoolroom to meander through the drawing room at Mount Benjamin, he will need all of that courage and nerve to confront the prejudices of his class. I don’t want anyone else’s perspective. Least of all Anstace’s; she knows too much already.

  For all her public championing of Geoffrey’s decision, it still irked Delia that it had been Anstace who had given Geoffrey the introduction to the Quakers who ran the ambulance unit he had embraced. Had she not done so, if might be him sitting here talking to her about Hubert. She felt something hardening in her; it was a new resilience, a recognition that if she allowed others to take a hand in what concerned her, she would have to take the consequences. She had faith that Geoffrey would honour his promise to write to her. A letter from him would be an intimate thing which she need not share with anyone else. However far off he might be, they might grow a connection by writing to each other.

  Oh, Hubert, she sighed, your flight has unravelled so much.

  ‘So do you think you will still go to Cheltenham?’ asked Anstace. It was a topic which they had already aired.

  ‘Still? Oh, I expect so. One day. If I have to become a teacher, I shall need to train.’

  Delia looked out into the dusk. She yawned.

  ‘And you, Anstace, which of your relations will you next settle upon?’

  Anstace could not summon the energy to reply. This was what they were reduced to and surrender was the only way forward. Let silence fall. Any answer she gave would be of no moment. Nothing was of any moment compared to the two incontrovertible facts: Hubert would become a soldier and Mr. Snodgrass would become meat. The world was different.

  Delia rose to her feet. She had heard the unmistakeable grumble of a motor coming up the hill.

  Friday, 30 October 1914

  Malton Park

  Dear Anstace

  I am writing from Malton Park. It is a sprawling encampment of long wooden huts and rows of sand-coloured canvas tents. I am in one of the former with about twenty other men of all shapes and sizes. I thought camping out in a tent might have been preferable but already there are complaints about the mud and backache from the camp-bedders so I have probably drawn the long-straw.

  It is as well that I had not set my sights on becoming an officer. They have a list, you know, of those schools which are of sufficient stature to begat officers and my grammar school, ancient establishment though it is, is not on it. It is the absence of an Officer Training Corps apparently. The army has been pouring resources into the public schools, it seems, for years for just this eventuality. It was an investment which did not stretch quite far enough to embrace grammar-school boys like me. To an extent, it is reassuring that they are giving commissions to men who have played at soldiering throughout their school-days but, I have to say, at Cambridge there were dozens of chaps from the ‘better schools’ who would not be able to command a queue for the omnibus let alone a company of soldiers. I have decided to keep Cambridge to myself. I don’t want to risk stirring up any unnecessary social preconceptions by letting on that a university man is in with the ranks.

  Actually, it is quite easy to put one’s past completely behind one. There are enough novel experiences to talk about when ‘off duty’ to allow the men here to keep their former life private if they want to. I think many, like me, are choosing to be guarded about the lives they have left behind. It might change as we get to know each other better but, to my mind, running ‘what once was’ alongside ‘what now is’ would be very difficult. The contrast would be acute. This regimented (literally), communal life is so very alien. Everything I valued is missing and I have not yet learned to enjoy what I have chosen instead. I expect this is the same for most of the men.

  In contrast, I think that many of the officers, particularly those newly commissioned, have slipped easily into army life. Most of them would have boarded at school, and would be far more ‘at home’ with dormitory living than the men I am now living alongside. Many of us have never had to sleep a few feet from another man, in a room full of other snorers and dreamers. However, I doubt that a suggestion that we swap accommodation with the officers would go down very well!

  Most of our time at present is spent in getting fit. I expect we are a most peculiar sight when at exercise. There might be eighty or so of us in one particular unit all performing the bends, jumps, squats and stretches which the officer takes us through. We have not got our uniforms yet and so we present a very motley bunch. Some of the chaps exercise in their vests. For others, the only concession they make to the situation is to remove their jacket and collar but they keep on their waistcoat. I sense a certain frustration on the part of the officers. They want to get us in uniform so that they can begin the serious drilling. It’s harder to bawl out orders to an assorted crew of civilians. A number of the instructors we have are retired officers, brought back into service to free the regular officers for the Front, and some of them are quite non-plussed, it would seem, by the strange, ill-assorted bunch of men they are expected to train. We are not likely to get kitted out, however, for at least a month and so the shirts and linen I brought with me—hardly a week’s supply—are having to suffice!!! Still, I am better placed than some of the men from humbler backgrounds who really have very little other than what they stand up in.

  Do you know? The oddest thing is the running. I wonder if you can remember the last time you ran fast? I couldn’t. It was probably chasing a mortarboard across a quad in a gust of wind or some such. We forget, as adults, how to run with intent. For children, running is as natural, as instinctive as walking. Somewhere along the way, we lose that so, as adults, when we run, we do so with a degree of apology for any ungainliness, for living a life so poorly managed that haste intrudes. Not any longer. Now I have to charge from one side of the exercise yard to the other as if my life depended upon it (as I suppose it might, one day). The rooks which circle overhead chuckle and caw with amusement at so many grown men sprinting here and there with no discernible purpose.

  I did not consider myself to be unhealthy. I carry no excess weight. But I have been puffing and panting like some antique toff who never does anything more strenuous than waddle from armchair to armchair in the plush stillness of his Club. I think, however, that my body is already beginning to adjust. Muscles are tightening. Joints are loosening. Stamina is increasing. This structure of flesh and bone which we inhabit is a remarkable thing. I suppose the next logical step, once one’s own body is up to its individual task, is to become part of an effective corps of men.

  Yours truly,

  Hubert Simmonds

  Tuesday, 3 November 1914

  Dunquerque, November 1914

  My dear Delia,

  You perhaps read about our adventures in the channel. The cruiser, MERCURY, was torpedoed. One of my new pals—a nice boy called Giles Morland, who thinks he knows Anstace—actually caught sight of the periscope of the submarine that did it. He was leaning over the rail, emptying his stomach at the time. Never seen a fellow find his sea-legs so quickly. He started yelling but of course there was nowhere to run. It is not a pleasant feeling k
nowing there’s a submarine on your tail. You’re suddenly aware of how fragile a ship’s hull is and how much water there is beneath it, in which a submarine could lurk.

  They lowered our life-boats and we were assigned one. We managed to pick up a dozen or so men from the MERCURY and get them aboard our troop-ship, the INVICTA. (If I were superstitious, I’d take comfort from the fact that a Kentish lad like me is sailing to France on a ship of that name.)

  In addition to the men we rescued, there was a body too. We had to haul him into the boat. They had not taught us at Jordans how to pick up dead men from the water. It is impossible to get a purchase. In the end you forget it’s a man. I started to laugh, we were having such trouble. Eventually, someone caught him by the belt and we dragged him up and over. It was different then; his humanity was somehow restored to him. It upset young Morland and he started to try and resuscitate the fellow. It was painful to see him labouring over the body. He became almost hysterical with frustration. In the end, I pulled him off the dead man. It had become too passionate. A corpse can do without that kind of assault.

  So I have seen death now. War dilutes it, you know. If I had helped fish this man from the Cam, I am sure I should have been knocked up by the experience. I expect I’d have regaled you with a saga of emotions. This death seems to have left me unmoved. In a curious way, I was ready for it. After all, war is defined by death and, though I am new to the business, I am not unprepared. I think it is just a question of context.

  I am surprised by how little apprehension I feel. I am glad that Hubert is still at Malton Park. This war will not be over by Christmas as they once thought it would but it may be finished before he is sent to the Front.

  Write to me with all the news. I rely on you.