The Soldier's Return

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘The army was an education for me,’ Sam said. ‘You think the army’s where they treat you like a number, but that’s only one side of it. The people you came across, and talked to, some of them had been to university and they would just talk to you, some of them, with no side. They knew all these things!’

  He took a particularly deep drag on the cigarette, coughed, heavily, drank.

  ‘That wasn’t it, though.’ He wiped from his eyes the little spring of tears brought on by the coughing. ‘There was a … It all meant something. Everything you did. The dead boring bits as well and God knows there were plenty of dead boring bits.’

  Leonard sipped his beer and seemed to dissolve in the deep brown summer warmth of the small snug with its two oak settles face to face over an imitation marble-topped table.

  ‘Even that isn’t the most important.’

  Sam seemed to drift away and Leonard made no attempt to prompt. Between them the silence feathered out. It seemed that the town was poised on its late daytime hinge: shops closed, work done for most and back home, auctions cleared, even children taking breath between tides, the day dying in the fingering shadows of the summer evening.

  ‘What am I trained to do, Leonard? I can bivouac in mud. I can get by on slim rations, for weeks if I have to. I can hump my kit wherever I’m pointed.’

  He paused. He felt as if he were hitting a barrier but he had to go on.

  ‘I can keep a rifle clean and hit somebody at three hundred yards; more if I concentrate a bit. And … keep going, you know, and take men along with me – and all that is to do with being drilled for fighting a war and I loved it, you see. Maybe that was the problem, it was what I could do. It was what I could do better than anything I’d done before and however much we all carped on and moaned, it was worth it, especially when you saw what I saw, what the Japs did, when you saw that. So there’s all that – and there’s more, really …’

  He stubbed out his cigarette carefully until the last wisps of smoke had been extinguished. ‘So what can you do with all that? There’s no answer is there? It just has to be locked away and forgotten. And it’s no use, is it?’

  The pitch of his voice had heightened and his breathing was tight. He fell silent. Suddenly embarrassed he grinned, reached out and tapped Leonard on the shoulder.

  ‘Poor old Leonard, having to sit through all this. Same again?’

  He knew that Leonard only allowed himself the one pint at this time of day. Grace would already be fidgeting. Tea would be on the table.

  ‘Just the half,’ said Leonard, after consulting his watch and making calculations. He added, ‘And there’ll be nothing as exciting again, I expect, will there?’

  The tone was envious. How unlived his own life by comparison.

  ‘That’s another point,’ Sam replied and he went out to the bar to fetch the drinks. And maybe that was the real point.

  He sent word by Leonard to Ellen that he would be home late and went off to see his father. He wanted to walk himself into the ground. After that encounter with Leonard, he felt both useless and angry. And the combination activated a loneliness he had felt, keenly, several times since his return despite the foolishness of feeling lonely when he was back among friends and family. Sam tried to dismiss all unhappy states as foolish, seeing them as weaknesses best ignored, soonest mended. He feared that his confession to Leonard had been a gross act of weakness. What did he want with confessing? What was gained by confession compared with what was lost? Now he would have to live with the knowledge that Leonard knew how weak he was.

  He could not think what had come over him.

  He walked fast, settling into a forced march rhythm which devoured the distance and soon shifted him out of the final cottaged bounds of the town and into the countryside largely unchanged for a century, centuries even. He took the longer road, plunging into a network of ancient paths and narrow twisting roads already bulging with hedge and tunnelled with trees leaning over to meet and touch and break up the evening light into a patternless dance overhead.

  He would see someone in a field now and then and raise a hand in greeting whether he knew the man or not, but he did not break his step. He wanted to drive himself as hard as he could on this mild Northern summer evening, in landscape tamed and placid, seeking exorcism through action. Only twice in the five mile walk did he encounter anyone: a boy wearily taking three cows back to the fields after a late milking and a young woman, still dressed for winter, a black headscarf wrapped tight, who scurried past with the barest acknowledgement, an expression on her face, he thought, which clearly indicated private pain, do not enter.

  He burrowed further into the country in this remote, unvisited, unexploited area, some of it uncharted still, and he felt it close around him. At first that was a comfort and then the hug of the slender lanes, the mating trees, the full-breasted hedgerows became oppressive. He had always hated being closed in. It had taxed his willpower to endure it abroad. He had not anticipated the same literally choking sensation back home. The unexpected attack of claustrophobia clammed him in cool sweat, sent him searching for a gap in the too busy, burgeoning hedges, looking for a way out of this rat run: open fields. He burst through and stood for a moment panting as if he had just bobbed to the surface after too long under water.

  He fixed his direction and walked on.

  The cottage was in the gloomiest, least attractive part of large grounds belonging to Miss Jennings, now in her seventies. A beech wood more than half circled it and shade was all but constant. Damp was permanent. The cottage had been shovelled up at the end of the nineteenth century with leftovers from an extension to the stables. It had two rooms upstairs, two down. Water came from a tap in the corner of the garden, next to the privy. Sam’s father thought he had fallen on his feet. He was nearly seventy.

  Since his wife’s death he had lived with his daughter, Ruth, unmarried and now in her early thirties, thought by everyone including herself to be for ever on the shelf. She was maid of all work up at the house. When they were young she had been good to Sam. He was the youngest and had arrived unplanned, the last of six, way past his father’s limited interest in children.

  The two other sisters were married and in another part of the county, visiting rarely. The eldest son had been killed in France soon after the outbreak of war. The second, wounded, had landed up in a hospital in Cornwall. He had recovered, and he wrote now and then but he had drifted away.

  Now that Sam had arrived he did not know why he had come. Ruth’s wide loving smile and her instant flit to boil the kettle and find food in itself might have made it worthwhile, had Sam not been so driven into himself.

  His father sat in a large floral patterned chair – a gift, a throw-out, from his employer – smoking black twist in a small-bowled pipe. Inside the fender beside a fire which was needed in that cottage despite summer, was a dish of tea. He was a small man but he held himself well. His thinning hair was merely sandy, his wife had carried the copper crown, but Sam took his hard blue eyes from his father.

  Sam sat down opposite him and immediately felt himself in opposition. There was so much he wanted to ask this man. He felt dizzy with a rush of questions he had rehearsed so often in Burma. Good questions about his experiences in the First War – to discuss war together, to be on common footing for once and with something to say to each other. He had thought that would bring them together but even at their first meeting soon after his return, his father had not wanted to talk about it. Hard questions like why could he not have somehow scraped up the little money to let him stay on at school? Unaskable questions – why had he been hit so often for so little trespass? Unthinkable questions – was his memory true, had his mother also been struck until David, the oldest, had intervened? Unanswerable questions – how do I, Sam, avoid ending up imprisoned like you, my father, like this?

  Ruth brought him tea and a couple of scones. He saw his father’s eyes flick to the scones and guessed that they were being checked for but
ter.

  Is Monty Fisher being moved up to Highfield?’ his father asked. Highfield was the workhouse, but that word was avoided, especially by those who feared ending up there.

  ‘I’ve heard talk, yes.’

  ‘I worked with Monty in Number 9 Pit after the war.’

  ‘He’s told me that himself.’

  ‘He was always terrible thin. We gave him “Drainpipe”.’

  ‘He’s thin enough now.’

  ‘I used to see him now and then. Not lately. Why would they send him up there?’

  ‘It’s not such a bad place, Dad.’ Ruth, still standing by the sink, kept her voice neutral.

  ‘She went up,’ said the old man. ‘To see Jane Tyson, she said, but I knew why she went up.’

  He laughed but there was no warmth in it.

  ‘You have no worries, Dad,’ she said, and Sam was moved by the sorrow in her tone.

  In the gloom of the shaded cottage – the lamp was not yet lit – the talk shunted along such rails for a quarter of an hour or so. Sam was not impatient with it. This was what there was, this catching up on the news of others, this occasional revelation of private fears, these smallest of pebbles added to the cairn of what they already knew. And yet, Sam thought as he decided to leave, how much was left out.

  ‘We never talk about what matters,’ he said to Ruth as she walked him across the grounds and into the lane.

  ‘He’s never been much of a talker.’

  ‘But you would think. Even when Mother died.’

  ‘It was such a shock. I think he grieves even after all these years, but he would never let on.’

  Nor would you, Sam thought, as he opened the gate which led out of the grounds. Ruth had a look of their mother, everyone said so, particularly the hair of course, like his own, copper beech, dark and in her case long and coiled and bunned into subservience, into plainness, into deliberate unattractiveness.

  She sensed his thoughts. She had always known him best.

  ‘We manage well enough,’ she said as they walked, her arm in his, under the canopy of fresh leaves. ‘Miss Jennings pays badly and she’s a bit of a devil but Dad’s his own worst enemy. The lawns have to be like billiard tables. And no weed dares show its face. But we have the vegetables and she’s good with game and meat sometimes. And there are her dogs.’ Ruth smiled with pure joy. ‘The dogs keep me going.’

  Ruth inclined her head just a little on to her favourite brother’s shoulder. They were about the same height. After their mother’s death, it was Ruth who had mothered him although so few years separated them.

  ‘It can’t be much of a life for you out here.’

  ‘We manage.’ Her tone ended that line of enquiry. ‘And I’m kept busy at the house. Then there’s Dad.’ The sadness could not be wholly ironed out of her voice.

  ‘Have you ever thought …?’

  ‘Of going away? Oh yes. Even now. I’d like to be one of those Land Girls. They have an independence about them. We have two round here. They’re so lively.’

  She laughed, a gentle, admiring laugh.

  Sam stopped and turned to her.

  ‘You should get away, you know. You know you should.’

  Ruth nodded.

  ‘I can’t leave him.’

  ‘What about the rest of us taking a turn?’

  ‘They won’t,’ referring to her sisters. ‘And you? You and Ellen and Joe? You’ll have enough to do keeping afloat between the three of you, I’ll be bound.’

  All was simply said and simply true.

  He gave Ruth a brief impulsive hug and a starved flush of gratitude went through her body.

  ‘I’m all right, Sam,’ she said. Tt’s you who shouldn’t clash yourself.’ She paused, but he would not talk and Ruth pushed no further.

  ‘I’d better go back,’ she said. ‘He’ll start to fret. Tell Ellen I’ll be through not next market day, the one after, and give Joe this.’

  From the deep pocket of her long coarse pinny she produced a burnished sixpence; its silvery sheen caught the long weakening rays of the sun and sparkled between her finger and thumb, like a smile.

  She watched him set off, straight-backed, at a smart pace and waited until, as she knew he would, he turned and waved, and then she tacked her way back home, worrying about Sam’s inner conflict so transparent to her, pausing every now and then to look about her, to breathe in the deep calm of evening, to repair the scars of longings that Sam’s too plain questions had unwittingly but painfully reopened.

  Ruth shivered a little as the damp came from the ground and finally, all excuses spent, she hurried over the shaven lawns, pulling her shawl tightly round her shoulders, to where her father waited in the dark in the cottage.

  The darkness wrapped around Sam as he walked back and now he welcomed it. These Lonnings, so narrow and dense and claustrophobic in the light, seemed like helpful secret passageways in the dark. The munching and cropping of incessantly feeding animals in the fields were the only sounds on that still night when even the light new leaves lay undisturbed. His own step sounded heavy and sure: it felt eerie moving in solitude in such a solitary place. He had known it before, more menacingly. Here it was not worrying but perhaps stranger, this body which was his striding through the unmooned lanes, guided by the merest gradations of shadowy dark colourings in the landscape. He felt surely alone and freed by that feeling.

  As the town drew nearer, like a kite being drawn in, he played with the idea of extending this walk. He could cut down into the Show Fields and follow the River Wiza or hike back towards Pot Mettle Bridge and through to the cemetery and over to Standing Stone and loop the town in this cool velvet-dark comfort. Or, for a wild moment, he considered swinging away from the town altogether, making for the old high Roman Road and stretching his legs on that until real tiredness forced a halt. The trouble now was that the walk had not wearied but aroused him.

  Yet, fair was fair, and like a homing pigeon, he forced himself to bear down on his own loft. The town was quiet, not yet closing time, the second house of pictures not yet out, chip shops empty, more dogs than men. The few street lights spluttering as if nervous after years of blackout.

  The fire was low but still burning. The gas lamp above the mantelpiece was full on. Steam was coming out of the kettle on the hob and he tugged his sleeves to make a glove before lifting it away from the fire. Then he went upstairs.

  A thick candle in a safe holder burned a perfectly still flame. Ellen, fully dressed, was in bed with Joe, the boys arms around her neck, his face nesting on hers, half obscuring it from Sam’s view. They seemed melted together and the sound of their breath was one.

  He wanted to smile and feel tender. A sight such as this, his son, his wife. He should steal away; Ellen would wake in good time, there was no need to disturb her. And this, perhaps, was the picture he had imagined during desperate times apart. What better could there be? All that was best in him wanted him to play his proper part. But the very perfection of the two of them, their loving docility and helplessness, the intertwined dependence, all haloed in the candlelight which cast him as a monstrous shadow on the farther wall, this closeness between them ignited a powder of unhappiness which led so swiftly to a scorch of jealousy that when he pulled back the blankets and shook Ellen too roughly on the shoulder, he was as much taken aback as she was.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Why are you up here?’

  ‘Ssshh, you’ll wake him.’

  ‘I can speak, can’t I?’ His voice sounded like a klaxon in the small still room.

  ‘I’ll come down. Just give me a minute.’

  ‘Why can’t you come down now?’

  Joe stirred. His eyes propped open. They fixed on Sam and he did not smile. He tightened his grip on Ellen.

  ‘Leave her be, can’t you?’

  The sentence was like a slap.

  ‘He was …’ Ellen did not finish the sentence. She did not want to betray Joe by telling Sam that he had shouted out and
cried and wheedled her into staying with him until he got off to sleep.

  ‘He’s never done crying!’ Sam felt too big in this room, with the two of them curled in the narrow camp bed. ‘He’ll have to grow up!’

  ‘He’ll grow up in good time.’ Ellen’s measured whisper, as much for the neighbours as anything, only incited Sam further.

  ‘Why can’t you speak normally?’

  ‘Why can’t you go downstairs?’

  ‘Let him fight his own battles, Ellen.’

  ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’ She turned her face away from Sam and began to rock Joe, just a little. The boy had been very upset. Now he was just as tense as before.

  ‘Joe.’ Sam’s voice assumed a half-whisper and sounded hoarse, harsh. ‘Joe – you don’t want to be a cry-baby, do you?’

  Joe’s return look was full of reproach.

  ‘Go away’ said Ellen firmly.

  ‘Go away,’ echoed Joe.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Ellen recognised the rise of Sam’s anger and made no reply. Joe held on even more tightly. Sam swayed above them, his shadow all but covering the wall behind.

  ‘I wish I could,’ he said, only half to himself; the words coming from a torment of disquiet out of his control, not knowing and, worse, in some way not caring what he meant.

  He went down the stairs as carefully as a very old man.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sadie sang ‘Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall’ to cheer Ellen up.

  Ellen hummed along, concentrating on the rapid machine-fire of the sewing machine. They were in Grace’s kitchen. Ellen was making white dresses for some of the young dancers who would be in the Carnival. The work had been scaled out among a few volunteers.

  ‘Just imagine if it’s a day like this.’

  Warm summer rain was sheeting down.

  ‘They had the dog show in the Market Hall but they couldn’t fit a carnival in.’ Sadie sought no response. ‘Dogs is one thing. Seven hundred kids is another.’

  It had been announced that the children of Wigton – about seven hundred – would march behind the two bands and the floats and the forty girls in white dresses who would dance with bells elasticated around their wrists and ankles and on each corner of a white handkerchief. All the children would receive a new threepenny piece and free tea in the Park.