I waited a bit. Collected myself.
‘And, yes. They shot Matty Harris. I didn’t wait for the command. Aimed for his heart, reckon I got it. Went down before they covered his head, never knew what hit him. I got shackled to a gun carriage for my pains, but at least, I did him well.’
Don’t mind admitting, I couldn’t see then. I must have shrugged on my clothes and just walked out. But I do know I shouted it again, and my words echoed round the dry like it was a chapel.
‘I did him well.’
The next day, the village lads still played at soldiers. But this time they tied the smallest to the tree in the square, formed a firing squad, and one broke ranks and shot first with a stick. And Mr Olds still said ‘Morning, Edwin,’ as he passed. But his eyes said something different.
At Levant, the morning shifts were long now, silent. There was no singing on Fritz on the way down. Only the great thudding of the engine. Down at the bottom, the air was thick with things unsaid. When someone spoke, their words seemed to flail against the tunnel walls and fade out into the dark.
The days seemed full of echoes.
A few weeks later, at shift-end, the first man to shaft bottom rang the bell. One ring. Ready to come up. And painfully slowly as always, Fritz began to move, picking up speed, until he was ploughing up and down, taking the usual four men a minute on their journey to the light, to dry clean clothes, the walk back home, and tea.
I was one of the last on. Over a hundred and twenty men above me on the rod, all getting on and off at the same time. The weight of a hundred men . . .
I caught the handle when it was my turn and stepped on. On, off, on, off. The dance up the shaft started. By now my boots did the dance themselves, finding the rhythm of the rod and moving with it. On, off. On, off.
Suddenly, it paused, breaking the rhythm. It paused at the top of the up-stroke, as though it was taking a breath. It began the downward stroke, I dropped my tins on the platform. By the time I picked them up, the rod was on the upward. I reached for the next handle but it didn’t come. I felt a thud. That’s all.
There was a kind of silence. Then it fell. And everything and everyone fell with it.
A great crashing, a rumbling; chaotic sounds, shouts, a single high scream, then that scream became two, then a hundred. Dreadful, it was. Howls. I crouched on my platform, tried to hold onto the shaft wall. Wet, rough. Complete darkness, no candle-ends left.
Into that shaft poured the things the earth wanted back. Whole sections of rod. Wood, splintered planks torn from the platforms. Stones, larger and larger, beaten from the sides of the shaft. Metal from the bindings. Water from some broken piping.
And men. Shaken from their perches, flung down the shaft, pennies into a well. Thudding off the rock walls like dough slapped on a tabletop. Beaten as they fell by the great rods of the engine, broken at the top, as they strained at the metal collars linking the sections, fracturing them, shaking free from their fetters, lunging downwards in a rush, tearing into everything, everyone, taking everything with them into howling chaos.
Then something hit into me. I fell into the shaft.
The shell hole was not empty. There were men there, groaning so softly it sounded like a choir.
Thing is, I was lying across some blokes and there was a leg, no body with it, just a boot. Wet red meat. Couldn’t see it properly. Couldn’t see it at all. But the smell was iron. If I moved my fingers, I felt sharp bone.
Not easy to breathe. But at least the barrage had lifted. They were shelling the lines now, soon be time to carry on. Wait for the all clear and go. When this blighter moved off me, at least — off my legs, off my back. Heavy bloke.
Someone was asking for water. But water was dripping — I could feel it, cold, hear it splashing.
Men must be moving out there. Stupid. Dislodging stones which bounced down into the hole. Better be bloody careful . . . idiots, wandering around out there. You never know — even when you think they’ve cleared off, even when you think the barrage has done for them in the trenches, bloody Hun pops up all over.
Dropped the rifle when I fell. Couldn’t find the bloody thing now. Wait until sun-up, maybe before — when the sky lightens. Men groaning, only so much air down here. Stink of earth, metal, sweat, piss. A man’s shit.
Extraordinary, these places. Then the men moved. Falling. Vertigo, probably. The barrage did that, got the eardrums something chronic. But God, this fellow was so heavy. Tried to shift him, he made a terrible noise.
Tried to push myself up, hand on the ground. Just bodies, soft, damp, no earth, lying on hardness. Tried to push the chap off, he was wedged, poor blighter. Something hard on top, pinning him down. ‘You OK there, mate?’ I said. No answer.
‘You OK there mate,’ I said and it echoed over and over, ‘OK there mate, ‘K there mate, there mate.’
Then someone said too loudly, ‘Water over here.’
Someone said, ‘This one’s alive.’
Someone said, ‘Need lifting gear.’
I remember that. How loud they were. I hissed, ‘Be quiet, lads. Not here. Not out here. No. Lifting gear’s too big, too much, you’ll get us all fucking shot.’
Someone said, ‘OK mate, we’ll get you out now, hold tight.’
Someone said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Edwin. My name’s Edwin Tregear. Have to get back to the trench. Have to change, walk home, after a nice drink of water. Who is asking for water?’
Someone said, ‘Bloke on top’s alive, just . . .’
Someone said, ‘You’re lucky mate. The beam’d have got you if it wasn’t for that blighter. Saved your skin, he did, poor bugger. Poor bugger.’
Lucky.
Two days it took for them to get to me. They brought me up in an ore bucket. I was cut about, bruised, thirsty, otherwise OK.
The ambulance was on its way back from Camborne, and there were two nurses working in the dry. They were very kind.
One nurse was no more than a girl, black shadows under her eyes. She tended men on the concrete floor. I saw four bodies, unmoving. Thirty in all, gone, she said. She looked up at me, shook her head.
She said Mr Olds’ trap would be coming back soon, and it would take me back to St. Just.
‘No.’ I said. ‘A drink of fresh water, some bread, and I’ll be fine.’
I walked up to the road and turned towards home. Here, at least, nothing had changed. Out at sea, cloud-shadows still chased each other towards the horizon. I could almost hear them laughing.
I did not look over my shoulder. I knew there was a knot of men walking just behind me, in silence.
At St. Just, I went straight to the bakery and through to the back. I shouted to see if Baker Jebb and Mrs Jebb were in the parlour, but they were not. I washed under the tap. Drank some more.
I fetched a tin measure, filled it from the sack and covered the slate in flour. I filled the white jug with milk to the third mark, just like I used to. I broke a piece of yeast, opened a twist of saffron. Sniffed them both. Found sugar. I heated the milk for the yeast, dropped in the sugar and the saffron, watched the milk turn golden. I took salt. Set a bowl of currants on one side. Then slowly, I worked at it. I worked the milk into the flour, my fingers stiff, sore, working it, working it, loosening my fingers . . . until I was surrounded by scent, warmth, swelling in my head. I watched my hands warming in the dough and working, working, bending and pulling, bending again, knuckles pressing into the dough as though my fingers were kneeling.
Mrs Jebb came back at some point. I saw her in the doorway, one hand on her breast, watching me gathering the dough together.
I slept while the dough was rising.
When it had risen and risen again, I made two loaves and set them to bake. And when they were done, I put them out to cool on the windowsill.
Later, I took one loaf of saffron
bread through to the shop and wrapped the other in muslin. I walked out of town towards Newbridge and I stopped outside the small stone house where the curtains were still drawn.
I went to the door and knocked. I waited, listening for a moment. Then I put the loaf on the doorstep, turned away and walked back to St. Just.
The Levant man-engine failed on 29th October 1919, killing 31 tin miners.
Storm Warning
I WAS ON LEAVE.
Telephone call from Istanbul, 3am, Wednesday. Woman’s voice. ‘Storm Warning.’
I know no one in Istanbul. Never been there. Just come back from my second tour in Helmand. In the background, I could hear other voices. A clicking, secretive, robotic, strange.
She repeated the message. ‘Storm Warning’.
I was awake now. Aware of a quiet made up of infinite little sounds. Aware of a darkness made up of infinite points of light. Aware of a breeze quickening.
I looked at the receiver. ‘Who is this?’ I said. My voice sounded odd. It didn’t belong in the room. I flicked on the bedside light. Two white moths came from the shadows, offering themselves like gifts. The curtain billowed. Rain against the sash, nails clicking on wood.
I put the receiver down on the duvet. Could just hear her voice, the deep simplicity, ‘Storm Warning. Storm Warning.’
Was there urgency in the voice? It sounded tinny now. ‘It gives us no pleasure when our suspicions are proved correct . . .’
I picked up the receiver. ‘Who?’ I said. ‘Who is us?’
There was no reply. There never is, with these calls. Just the clicking in the background. A room full of stick insects. A woman’s voice.
Gas Gangrene
For the soldiers buried at Tyn Cot Cemetery, Flanders.
IT’S A SICK JOKE, mate, looking back. You people think gas gangrene was some sort of bloating, a passing blackening of the lungs, a momentary seizing up, that it went as the clouds dispersed. You have no idea. No effing idea. You go to your medicine cabinets, your little boxes of aspirin, supply of little pink plasters, tubes of Germolene, white bandages nicely sealed and sterilized, some new beauty of a panacea, ointments for burns, cuts, anything, sachets of Dioralyte in case some poor baby has the trots for a while. You sit back and watch telly while your kids are sick, knowing there’s a hospital, a doctor, an effing brain at the end of a teensy telephone call if things turn out bad.
Gas gangrene. The double of the double whammy you talk about nowadays. Little soldiers in the soil, better than any bloody Germans. Making their way under cover of darkness, damp and cold, under your wraps, into a sore place. So easy matey, blowing it up better than any mines under front lines planted by sappers, miners, tunnelling for days, weeks in the dark.
You know those guys, they came all the way from Wales to tunnel Flanders’ mud? They dug so quietly, they could hear the voices of the men tunnelling the opposite direction — guttural noises through a mud wall. It was a game, a race to lay the mines quickest. To set the fuses, like those little soldiers marching up your tissues, bloating, huffing and puffing round ankle bones until your feet — my feet — were so swollen your boots split, but you didn’t notice until they fell apart and someone shouted, ‘Christ, Earnest, your bloody foot,’ and it wasn’t a foot, it was something else, slimy, slippery, a substance no one had made a word for.
We were nineteen soldiers. Then we were sixteen, and I cried my guts out. Then twelve, and I shook all day until someone gave me their rum ration. Eleven, and I’d asked him to be my Best Man, if — . Eight, and it didn’t matter. It was a parlour game, Catch as Catch Can, who’s effing next, save the tea in the mugs Skip, I’ll be back at bath time. Seven, and he didn’t have the decency to die out there, was shot through the head when he stood up for a piss, stayed propped against the wall, holding his willy, just looking a bit surprised.
Nearly ninety years later, and the young men are — what? Eating out, drinking out, head-banging, is that what they still call it? In discos, or clubs, or raves? Disgusting, some of the things they get up to. Don’t even know the names: Passchendaele, Somme, Ypres. Forget it. Someone said they were teaching them cookery now.
Frank went a bit funny, started shouting for his mum. He was only eighteen, shouting he was scared, wanted to go home, see his brother, and we shot him. Six.
And you know, I can’t remember the others now. But we are three soldiers, all that’s left. Been dying for ninety years, mate. Gas gangrene. We’re in the soil. Can’t leave the place.
We watch your coach loads gawping at shell holes, watch bored little girls trailing round new museums, watch older men standing (at least heads bowed) under the arch at Ypres, listening to the Last Post, and I can feel the guilt, feel the relief — we don’t have to go through this, and this, this this and fucking this — and they’ll go back on the ferry, the plastic, beery ferry with its orange seats, its kiddies shouting and swearing, young blokes like us bored shitless, reading magazines with pictures that no self-respecting man would show to a lady in my day. And I think that’s gas gangrene, that is. Not just my foot, my leg, my bloody guts spilling into the mud. It’s everywhere.
Road Kill
HE’S GEORGE ‘SPARKS’ Faraday, eighty-something, old soldier. Sapper, mines, Military Cross. Still wears heavy boots, still tries to stand straight, still on parade. Hasn’t been a soldier for half a century, but he walks through minefields in his sleep. Leads his platoon through booby-trapped wastelands before breakfast. Lies in trenches, shells flying as close as that while he drinks coffee at The Legion, eats macaroons. Waves a foraging party off to their deaths as he lays one place for lunch. Machine-gun tinnitus stops him hearing voices clearly on the telephone. He picks up a boot from the site of a shell explosion just before peeling two spuds for tea, drops the boot fast when he sees tendons, sharp white bone, wet red meat.
People won’t let him forget. Invite him to speak at dinners, made him Legion Chairman. He parades on Remembrance Sundays, his MC clinking against his campaign medals as he marches. He clears his throat, reads the names of the fallen, the words dropping into the silent November air like hailstones, like bullets, like clods of earth after an explosion.
‘They shall not grow old as we who are left . . .’
Sparks only forgets when he’s with his animals. Injured badgers, foxes, squirrels, hedgehogs — a calf, once — found in the busy lane outside his house, a rat-run between villages. He’s done this since he retired; finds them by torchlight, mute and motionless on the tarmac or half on, half off the verge where they’ve dragged themselves with broken legs, ribs, internal bleeding. Road kill often happens second hit; he tries to get there first.
Sparks had a dog when he was a boy. When he was ten, his dog three, he stole a bar of chocolate. His father, normally a mild man, made him stuff the whole bar in his mouth, then thrashed him hard until he was sick.
‘You’ll not forget this in a hurry,’ his father said when he’d finished. Sparks must have tried a smile. Next day the dog had gone. Been put down.
‘I said you’d not forget,’ his father said.
Sparks lives on the edge of the village. In his garden, behind an old brick wall, he’s built a shantytown of sheds, chicken-wire runs, cages. Downwind, the musk stink of vixen, the heavier stink of dog fox, the sweetness of fresh straw and sawdust; at night the dusty shuffle of badgers, the staccato snuffle-panting of frightened animals, the occasional yelp, whimper.
Sparks knows most things. Calls in the vet for some complicated stuff, otherwise he does it himself. He’s got a locked cupboard in the shed where he keeps medical supplies: antiseptics, analgesics, splints, bandages, antibiotics. Barbiturates for the ones that won’t get better.
The majority don’t get better. Sparks says that’s no excuse not to try. It is a reason not to give them names, but there’s always an exception. Today there is one dog fox with a name. It is young, handsome, ag
gressive, with two broken hind legs, a fractured pelvis. It snarls, tries to bite; Sparks throws a sack loosely over its head before he tends it, ties twine round its jaws, draws the sacking back so the fox can see, fondles its ears, talks to it. He has called it Stanley.
Sparks was married once, a long time ago, before he left for his war. Ada was little and dark; he carried the thought of her in his pocket, wrote home about how much he loved her, wrote about his plans for when it was all over, how he’d get a job as a surveyor when he got back, how they’d save up, buy that house near Norwich they’d always had their eye on; he’d grow vegetables, she’d keep chickens, he wouldn’t have to eat bully beef ever again. He never told her he missed her in bed. Never said that some nights, crouching stiff in the dark against the concrete supports of a bridge, waiting for first light, waiting to crawl on hands and knees along a river bank, searching out, sniffing out mines, making the banks safe for the men . . . the warmth of her in his head kept him sane. He never wrote to her about what it was like, his War. Kept things inside. Never sent her the nightmares he had while waking. Protected his lady. Came home on leave, unexpected, found her with a belly full of someone else’s child.
He never married again.
They still ask Sparks to talk about his war in the village, but he’d rather talk about his animals. Sometimes he stops in the middle of sentences, listening, says, ‘Where was I?’ Sometimes he forgets to turn up at the Legion. He’s started falling over, loses his balance easily, but still walks to the shop for fresh vegetables. He meets friends at the shop, but he’s begun to ask if they’ve met before.
Sparks tends Stanley the dog fox. Spends hours with him, sitting on straw, talking to him, stroking his head, breathing in the stink, fox stink, fox faeces. Today he’s sitting with Stanley. Sparks fell in the kitchen, hit his head against a cupboard, stuck a plaster over. Came out to the cages, left the kitchen door wide. It’s getting dark. Stanley is weak. Sparks threw the sacking over Stanley’s head, bound his jaws with twine, and the dog fox lies unmoving, his yellow eyes fixed on Sparks.
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