by Melvyn Bragg
Sam took them all in. It could have been no more than a couple of minutes. It was one of those times when, despite movement, life grew still, almost stopped, became like a photograph, printed itself on memory, which grew to be the picture, the truth of all the best life in that place at that time. And later he thought he could remember the exceptional lightness. When you took off your pack for the last time of the day, the body seemed to know that, the shoulders could ache in peace, you floated, you discovered the secret of levitation, you walked in giant steps. Sometimes – as on that evening – it went to your head, this lightness, this bonus of euphoria, sheer physical relief alchemised into momentary happiness.
And the eight of them (including Sam: they were two under strength) were so odd planted there. The absurd improbability that those eight who would call themselves ordinary men from a sliver of north and west Cumberland, a remote edge of Europe, should be halfway round the world, where wild buffalo replaced Jersey cows, tigers not dogs disturbed the night, snakes not cockroaches snuggled into your bed and women wore silk.
Strangers to each other before they enlisted, now bound in a way that enthralled his imagination. Roped together by the place they came from, the villages, the words, the local entanglements, like a small raft on the ocean. Wrenched from mundane occupation, they had been translated into the ancient and legendary tradition of soldiers fighting a just war half forgotten by those who had sent them, forced to be sufficient to themselves and to their own history, with no prospect of return save through wounds or a victory which could take years. And miles from home.
Perhaps oddest of all, though the section had changed over the years, through death and injury, it was always the same. So they made their new home, their new mundane world, their new common landscape in the section, in the company, in the regiment.
In those moments of observation, packed and vivid as such insights are, Sam knew all those things and felt a flow of love for it -which could never be admitted nor could it be described, but it filled his body and his mind, almost mystical.
He wanted to write it down for Ellen and Joe. Joe was five now. He wanted to distil all this. Ellen would understand. She knew everything about him. Instead he knew he would say he was as well as could be expected and he missed them both and maybe something about seeing a monkey for Joe and God Bless. Nothing about this vision of the men, their past, their present, and Ian crooning at the heart of it, no special light on him from the sky brewing with rain, but somehow innocent and hopeful and bringing the picture together.
‘Cha’s up!’
Ian’s voice sang out.
There was a low ironic cheer – ‘About time’ – and the men moved over to Ian, their piallas at the ready to scoop out the boiling tea.
Sam took Ian with him on the first night patrol.
The next two days were harder. The Japanese had not simply melted away. If they were preparing a stand down the road then they were also making it as difficult as possible to get down the road. Sam’s section was one of those bang at the front and they thought themselves lucky in these last days that they had experienced nothing worse than the total fear that preceded the two minor clashes which they had survived.
The third day was a little easier, although there was one stretch where they were pinned down by two snipers. Doug eventually got one of them. The other was taken out by the next section along the line.
They moved on, bent low, rifles ready, green in green, the beloved and impractical bush hat bobbing like a large, exotic leaf.
The small Buddhist monastery was just outside the usual village wall. Alex saw it first. They stopped. The order came to attack and Titch cursed, as he always did, that they were always the blokes who got the sticky jobs and why hadn’t he joined the pioneers? Sam loosened the pins in his grenades and led them forward.
The only sound – a loud and chilling sound – was of the half-wild pariah dogs barking frenziedly inside the village. The monastery had to be taken out first. Sam took Doug and Titch with him. The others crept near, more slowly.
The building was of the simplest and smallest kind, thank God, Sam thought, which also signalled a small and unimportant village. Titch and Doug got up to it, one on each side, and waited for Sam. Was it booby-trapped? The Japs could not have had time to do anything at all elaborate. Sam felt an engulfment of fear to which he should have become hardened, but he never did.
He went ahead, stood behind the wall, reached out with the bayonet of his Lee Enfield and pushed the door. Nothing. He pushed harder. Reluctantly, it creaked open. Nothing. Use the grenades? They would be too dug in if they had stayed. It was very quiet. He looked at Doug and Titch and nodded and they took short breaths and pressed down the fear and they were ready and went in fast, low, rifles scanning and searching.
No one.
Not even evidence of a struggle.
Something calm in that tiny space, as if abandoned recently but not despoiled, still fashioned for contemplation. The four simple rooms were empty. The search was done as rapidly and as silently as humanly possible.
They came out and moved towards the village wall. That was some protection. Sam looked hard through a crack in the wall. An empty settlement, dogs barking madly behind the huts and on a gentle rise of land, a small, whitewashed pagoda. It looked so innocent, the pagoda, so small and plain. They were lucky, Sam thought, white pagodas.
They went over the wall, fast, scaled out and were soon at the cluster of huts which formed the village.
‘They’ve been in a bit of a rush.’ Titch, who was on Sam’s left, indicated some bullock carts, piled with equipment under a loose canvas cover.
Sam nodded along the line and they divided the huts between them. Followed the drill. Copybook. Covered for each other. Grenades ready to lob. Empty. Empty. Empty. Remains of fire. Cooking pots simmering.
Ian saw them first and the sight stopped him dead in his tracks. For a split second, despite no sound, Sam thought he had been hit. He swayed and Sam moved across to catch him before he fell, but Ian merely swayed and then Sam and the others saw what he had seen.
All the men had seen sights which had wounded and stunned the world they carried in their minds from England. Each one had a chronicle of horrors, of pulverised skulls and bodies ripped open, scattered entrails and spilled brains, a flopped heap of dead, of decaying flesh invaded by maggots, of this done to friends as well as enemies, and somehow it had to be ignored or put away, put deep away for the nightmares and shock of later when there was time.
None of them had seen anything like this.
The Japanese had taken, when they were all accounted for, eleven young children, some very young, boys and girls. They had tied them to trees with barbed wire and then bayoneted them to death.
Not long since.
There they hung.
Eleven trees. The children naked; ripped open, dead.
Perfectly still, save sometimes for blood which was driving the pariah dogs into a frenzy of leaping and scrabbling at the trunks, but they would catch their paws on the barbs and fall back.
Sam felt unlike he had ever felt before. His mind stopped being itself, not joined to the horror. He looked at the children so intently. He knew that the sight would never go. It scarred his mind. It existed in a time of its own. If he was conscious of anything outside the strangeness in his head it was of the same reaction in the others. Later he thought he understood from those seconds what it was to go mad, to lose your mind.
He saw flies settle greedily on the face of the nearest child, a small boy, and he moved forward, wanting to brush them off, and so found voice. It was hoarse and faint. He forced some spittle down his throat.
‘Doug, Titch, Yoke, we’ll take them down. You – ‘he pointed to Ian and the others, ‘dig the graves.’
They could not linger. But no one dissented. Nor would they have been stopped.
‘Individual graves,’ Sam ordered harshly.
He walked fast to the first tree and
found where they had twisted the barbed wire and he untwisted it, pulling down his sleeves to protect his hands. Then he walked around the tree unwinding it, but took care that the child did not slither to the ground. He carried the warm little body over to the rise which bore the whitewashed pagoda, where Ian and the others were violently scooping out the graves.
He went back a second and then a final time and throughout all this not one word was uttered by any of the men until the eleven bodies were buried and stones were put on them and the barbed wire trailed around them to keep off the dogs.
When they had finished they stood in an awkward ragged line wondering how to take their leave. Sam looked up and stared unblinking at the white pagoda, seeking an explanation. He felt rooted to that spot.
Alex had made a bamboo cross which he knocked into the ground above the neat row of graves.
‘I know you’re not Christians,’ he said, ‘but rest in peace.’
Alex answered the unasked question.
‘They did it to show us what they are going to do to us,’ he said. ‘They did it to intimidate us.’
Sam nodded. It was as if he could literally feel his brain hardening with anger. With such a force of anger that left him breathless. If he could bayonet every Japanese soldier from Burma to Tokyo, he would do it gladly.
‘Let’s go,’ a voice said. It was his.
No one looked back.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sam liked a quiet time to himself before the morning shift. On this mid-autumn morning, he got up just after five and stirred the fire very gently. He had banked it up the night before but it did not do to rush at it and besides he did not want to disturb Ellen who lay, asleep he hoped, strictly on her side of the bed.
It was surprising how little noise you could make if you tried. Even in such a cramped space. There was some fat left over and he fried two slices of bread, setting the frying pan on the renewed glow of coal. He took the lid off the kettle so that it did not whistle when it boiled on the gas ring. Meanwhile he dressed, his pullover needed now, a real chill in the morning especially with the wind.
He sipped the hot tea silently and took care to eat just as silently as he sat on the chair and looked into the fire as if he were a boy again, with Ruth, seeking out pictures.
Ellen’s breathing was steady but he was not sure. It was difficult to judge now. Strain as he could, there was no sound from upstairs. Blackie soft-padded out of nowhere and he poured a little milk into his saucer. The lapping was the loudest sound in the room.
Too soon it was time to go. He had hoped – as on many mornings over the past couple of weeks – that Ellen would wake up and he would hold her and feel her warmth and they would be as they had been, his guilt pardoned, their world to rights again. But she did not stir and he closed the door almost stealthily to make sure that if she was asleep she would not be disturbed by his leaving.
Ellen listened until she heard the distinctive hollow sound of his footsteps in the alley and then she spread herself diagonally across the bed and tried to claim a final relaxed stretch of sleep. Soon Joe crawled in with her and she retreated once more to her own side, holding him off when he tried to warm up against her back. She wanted to nurse herself through her misery without the scent of it reaching the boy and for that she needed to isolate herself whenever and however she could.
She had taken some days off during Joe’s half term, to be with him. It was too late to go anywhere for a holiday. ‘Come pickin’ spuds with me,’ said Sadie. ‘Lots of kids go. And they get paid! You should see their faces when they get their own wages. You would like that, wouldn’t you, Joe?’
Sadie was in their house as she had been increasingly over the past few weeks and although Joe did not quite understand what potato picking entailed nor even what getting his ‘own wages’ quite meant, he was always game to go along with Sadie.
‘I’m not taking a holiday just to work.’
‘It’s not work. It’s a holiday with pay. The kids love it. You get a ride there and back in a lorry. The farmer makes hot tea and maybe cocoa for the kids at dinner time. They play about the barns and whatnot. There’s all the animals. Want to come, Joe?’
‘Yes!’
‘We’ll see.’
Ellen was not easily persuaded. On the Monday she took up a standing invitation from Leonard to take Joe for a longer than usual ride in the car. At the last moment, at Grace’s suggestion, Mr Kneale was inserted into the party, which rather dismayed Leonard, but Grace would not hear of Mr Kneale being rejected and besides, as she pointed out, he would find interesting things to say about the places they passed through. Which he did and, as it rained non-stop, they scarcely left the car, which meant that Leonard spun from one village to another without any chance of escape from Mr Kneale’s informative commentary. Joe got over the thrill of being in the car quite soon and when Leonard began serious smoking – with the windows jammed shut against the rain – he began to feel very queasy and was sick, twice, once very nearly in the car itself.
On Tuesday she took him to Carlisle. The main purpose was to see The Bells of St Mary’s at the Lonsdale, but Ellen caught an earlier bus so that she could wander around the shops, especially the big department store. Joe’s boredom was broken once or twice – by putting a penny in the huge red weighing-machine and, more absorbingly, by a kindly young assistant explaining the system of rocketing capsules which whirled money and change around the vast store like an aerial railway set.
But he was soon bored again and after being half-impressed by tea at the select Lonsdale, he was less than enchanted with the film, although he tried to be for his mother’s sake.
On Wednesday they turned up for potato picking. Joe loved it. This, Friday, was their last day and they were at the top of Station Road by eight o’clock, waiting again for the lorries.
Those who had gone out to the farms to help save the harvest that year had come largely from the bigger towns or the cities. The potato pickers were entirely local. There were no men. Many of the women were those who dominated the rose-hip, mushroom, berry-collecting sorority. Some of them were rough, all of them looked it. Old boots, often their husbands’, or cut-down Wellingtons, thick socks, the oldest, warmest skirt possible, layers of blouse and wool, a range of dark coats which vied with each other for shabbiness, and, the only vivid touch, coloured headscarves.
At first Ellen had been a bit self-conscious, both of her own bulky appearance – she had raided Grace’s ‘old’ wardrobe – and the rough look of the women collected outside Miss Peters’ sweetshop at the top of Station Road. But after a few cheers at the one or two men who waved at them as they cycled to work and jeers at the three cars which sped past, Ellen found herself smiling. It was like being back at the factory, the girls together, that feeling of liberty inside a group doing the same thing.
‘We are Fred Karno’s Army’, they sang and they cheered anyone they recognised as the lorries rattled over the rutted roads down to the Solway Plain where they stopped at the farms and the farmers called out how many hands they wanted, how many women, how many children – much cheaper rate, teams of two, but two children could not work together. There were exceptions. Speed and his oldest brother made up a team and nobody objected, although the farmer paid the older boy less than the adult rate. Joe had been disappointed that Speed and Frank had been dropped off before him on the Wednesday and the Thursday and his hopes for better luck third time were dashed. The same farmer called them out again.
Because Joe was small and perhaps because Ellen did not look as hungry as some of the others, they were left to the last drop. Sadie had stayed with them out of loyalty. She was working with Big Marjorie, who wore very small spectacles and was rather slow and so, as Sadie explained – loudly, to everyone – she could make up for her. Their billet was a small farm near the sea.
The farmer had marked out their stints with wooden pegs. There were two wire baskets to each stint. First the tra
ctor opened up the stitch, scooping the potatoes out of the heavy, clarty ground. They would start picking. He drove the tractor slowly back down the field and waited until the first stint had filled the baskets and then made his way up again. To set the pace he would put what he reckoned to be the fastest pickers on to the first stints. They would wait with their baskets and heave the potatoes into the cart behind the tractor. There would be a brief rest and then the tractor roared down the field to swing round and open up the next stitch.
Sadie announced to anyone who would listen that this was a walkover. She had been at places working two tractors. That killed you.
Like several of the more experienced women, Sadie had acquired a large coarse sack into which she had cut a head hole and arm holes. This was her uniform and as she bent to collect the potatoes she was, from a distance, indistinguishable from the earth.
It was another raw and dull day. The wind came from the north and bit the skin. The clouds were high, massed, it was possible only now and then to see that they were moving. There was a vastness of sky over the Plain and the sword of sea reflected it in a leaden dullness, alleviated only by the white horses which broke up the surface as the potato pickers broke up the surface of the dour flat landscape.
The farm was isolated. The gulls circled with their lonely, alluring cries. The line of bent backs slowly scythed across the field. From a distance they could have been mere creatures, bent to the task, bound to it, obeying the rule of the machine. The cheers drained away. It was hard and mean work and for many it was the best they would get all year and they knew it and had to live with that sullen thought. They picked the potatoes and were chided by the farmer if he spotted any loose work. Later in the day he gave one of his sons a swill and instructed him to go over the ground already worked and gather up the leftovers.
The farmer was not a young man and even the tinker women could not get a rise out of him. He ignored the women once he had seen them out from the lorry. He knew that he had the scrapings because his was the most remote and one of the smallest farms and paid least. He made them feel mean and low. He cut into their dinner hour, five minutes either end. His wife brought a pail of tea and slopped it, carelessly.