Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  I walked past and went on into the churchyard. A stream skirted the edge, the gravestones reaching all the way down to the sloping bank, where moorhens patrolled in a line. Beyond the stream there was an iron fence with a kissing gate and beyond that what looked like a cricket field. Here it was difficult to believe that we were at war, so peaceful and pastoral was the panorama, so far from Flanders in every way. A woman tidying the graves looked up as my shoes scuffed the gravel. She took in my uniform and smiled, though she didn’t say anything. Neither did the vicar, who appeared just then in a black cassock, scurrying like a large moorhen himself out of the church porch. His expression seemed abstracted and I hoped he wasn’t the figure of fun and gossip that our vicar back in Edgewater was. He was surprised to see me, I think, and a brief smile unraveled along his lips. But then he scurried on to the woman tidying the graves and engaged her in conversation.

  I entered the church. It was small. A large brass cross glistened on the white cloth of the altar. Two bunches of flowers stood on either side of the cross. As I looked around, I could see that there were flowers everywhere, on the pulpit, next to the organ, and the table where the hymn books were stored—this was a much-loved, much-used place. Two rows of pews at the front of the nave were closed off by small wooden doors: private pews, no doubt belonging to the more important personages or families in the area. I hated that sort of thing—my own family had its pew in our village—but I had never done anything about it.

  I sat farther back and thought for a bit. I can’t say that I had been very religious before the war but, by now, after I had seen what I had seen, whatever residue of faith I might have had had been shot to pieces, like my pelvis. At the same time, the Christmas truce had shown me the power of Christianity to influence some men to behave well. Those with faith behaved better at Christmas, but how could I have faith?

  But it wasn’t faith that concerned me most that morning. I took out the photograph of Wilhelm. I smiled, recalling Izzy’s misunderstanding and her earnest questioning. It was, I supposed, an easy mistake to make.

  Sitting in the pew, I also took out my handkerchief and polished the toe caps of my shoes where they had scuffed the gravel outside. This was another mannerism inherited from my father that I couldn’t shake. He was obsessive about the shininess of his footwear.

  The vicar came back in, wished me a polite “Good afternoon” as he went by, and began taking the hymn numbers from yesterday’s service from out of their holder.

  With a start, I realized that it must have gone noon. I confirmed it with a glance at my pocket watch. Turning over in my mind the thought that was forming, I got up and went out into the sunshine.

  As I approached the school I could see a small knot of mothers gathered by the gate. In the country, unlike the city, many children went home for lunch.

  And then, across the playground, I saw her. Sally Ann Margaret Ross. There was no mistake. The same blond hair, the familiar Alice band, the same eyebrows and cheekbones. She was stooping and, from the expression on her face and the stern cast of her mouth, she was ticking off a young child, who had clearly done something wrong, but not very wrong. Maybe Sam Ross wanted the child’s mother to see the infant being rebuked, so the punishment would be reinforced at home. At any rate, the lecture didn’t last long, for she stood up and shooed the child across the playground, toward its mother. She put a whistle in her mouth and her gaze raked the playground for any other infringement. Apparently, Sam Ross—at least on playground duty— was a strict teacher.

  All this flashed through my mind—I remember now—but it was soon gone. For the fact is that my head was awash in other thoughts, thoughts I had had the night before, again in the car on the way to Middle Hill, and again in the church. Sam Ross was taller than I had imagined and she also had a figure that Wilhelm’s photo—a portrait only—had not even hinted at. But most of all there had been her manner, when stooping, admonishing the child. It was an amalgam of firmness and tenderness, tempered and graceful—here was a young woman of considerable presence. Her movements matched her beauty. I could easily understand what Wilhelm had seen in her.

  For all these reasons and, I told myself, because she was so obviously on “playground duty,” I didn’t approach her there and then. Instead, I walked on and reached the Lamb. It had opened at noon. There weren’t many in the pub and they all fell silent when I entered. It was an appreciative silence, though, not hostile. In fact, after I had ordered a pint of bitter, the barman told me that the first drink was on the house and this, I later discovered, was not unusual for war veterans. (He actually said, “The Kaiser’s paying,” and grinned.) I thanked him, raised my glass to the others, and then retreated to a table in an alcove to consider what I was going to do. I took out Wilhelm’s photo one more time, and then put it away again.

  While I was sipping my bitter two things happened that affected my plan. First, I gathered from the general conversation in the bar that a couple of people were billeted in the pub, helping to build an airfield near Wellesbourne, the construction site I had seen on my way there. Then an older man came in. The barman poured him a pint and took from behind the bar a plate with a chunk of bread and some cheese on it. The older man accepted all this and sat near me, reading that day’s newspaper. He nodded to me affably and bit into his cheese.

  Later, when the cheese and bread were finished, the barman came across to take away the empty plate.

  “When’s the hearing?” the barman said.

  “A month from now,” replied the older man.

  “And who comprises the jury?”

  “The board, you mean? It’s not a jury, strictly speaking. It comprises me, as headmaster, one of the teachers, elected by the staff, two school governors, and a school inspector from Coventry—five in all.”

  “And what are her chances?”

  At this, the older man drew a finger across his throat.

  The barman disappeared and the headmaster went back to his paper.

  Later, I asked the barman for a sandwich but he didn’t have any. The headmaster, he said, had a special arrangement. So I ordered a half pint of bitter and sat on, thinking, long after the headmaster had gone back to school for the afternoon lessons.

  Eventually, an hour or so later, I drove back to my parents’ house. I didn’t wait for school to finish, as had been my original intention, and I didn’t approach Sam Ross with Wilhelm’s photograph.

  When I got back to Edgewater, the first thing I did was to buy a secondhand motorcycle going cheaply in the village garage and which my father paid to have renovated (fortunately, the kick-start was on the right side, the side of my good leg). Then, a couple of days later—in what I thought was my niftiest move—I said good-bye to my parents, rode the bike to Middle Hill, and rented a room in the Lamb. They seemed happy to have me, the food could have been worse, there was a garage for my bike, and I could run up a tab at the bar. My course at Stratford was forty minutes away.

  It took only a day or so to put my half-formed plan into operation. One evening, when he came in for a late-night whisky, I engaged the headmaster in conversation. He was avid for news, as everyone was, as to what the Front was actually like. He came into the pub most nights and, in less than a week, he had done what I hoped he would do—he invited me to give a short talk at the school, about life at the Front. I said I would be delighted.

  And so, the following week the whole school was collected together in the gymnasium, which doubled up when needed as a school hall. The children sat cross-legged on the floor, the staff sat on the stage at one end, and a few parents turned up and stood around the walls. I shook hands with all the staff beforehand, so I was introduced to Sam.

  The headmaster had asked me not to frighten the children with too much gore and reality, and so I did not dwell on the atrocities I had seen, the bodies blown to smithereens, the unrecognizable lumps of flesh and hair caught up on the barbed wire, the pitiful screams of grown men beyond the pale and beyond rescu
e in the shapeless darkness of no-man’s-land. I did mention the devastation—I didn’t think I could avoid it altogether—but with luck, I thought, the war would be over well before the young children in that gymnasium were old enough to fight.

  They were young children who couldn’t sit still for very long, and would most likely need to go to the lavatory at any moment. So I talked mostly about the Christmas truce, which was popular with the headmaster and the staff. The children were surprisingly upset about the capture of the rabbits; I think that from where they were sitting, they would have preferred it for the men to have gone hungry than for two rabbits to be killed and eaten. Everyone knew “Silent Night,” of course, and could relate to that. I mentioned my meeting with a German officer, and our exchange of gifts—everyone thought the plum-pudding business was very funny—but, and here’s the thing, I didn’t mention Wilhelm by name or the business with the photograph. And I carefully avoided looking in Sam Ross’s direction during that part of my talk. Instead, I moved quickly on to our agreement about the burial of the dead—a suitably uplifting theme for a school environment.

  And then it was over. The children gave me three cheers and scampered off. The headmaster invited me and some of the staff back to his office for a sherry, and there I made a point of talking to Sam. I asked her if she lived in the village; she said that she did but she didn’t volunteer where. I asked her if she was married; she blushed and shook her head. I said I was staying at the Lamb, that that was where I had met the headmaster, and asked her if she ever went there. Again she shook her head. I asked her what the highlights of Stratford were but she said that, apart from Shakespeare’s house, she wasn’t sure if there were any.

  Wilhelm’s photograph of her had been in black and white, of course, but in the flesh, in the blaze of sunlight that swept in through the open French windows of the headmaster’s study, she was not so much black and white as gold and white. Her hair, the fine down on the lobes of her ears, on the angle of her jawline, on the smooth expanse of her arms, glowed gold, formed a frame of gold dust against the ivories and creams of her flesh and her open-necked shirt.

  I can’t say that our first meeting was a resounding success in terms of conversation, but I remember the word that came into my mind to describe her. She was mouthwatering.

  I did notice that she seemed a bit cold-shouldered by some of the staff, but I thought nothing of it, not then anyway.

  Although our first meeting was not all it might have been, I thought I had time on my side and was not unduly worried. The authorities at Stratford had been a bit miffed when I had told them that I was taking that Tuesday off and most of the time the rules were pretty strict. After all, there was a war on and the government was paying for the course. But when they had found that I was giving a talk at a school, about the war, their attitude softened and I was forgiven.

  We worked long hours—nine till six-thirty—but we did get Thursday afternoons off and so the next Thursday I sat in the smoking room of the Lamb, reading. Although the bar was closed, so far as the sale of alcohol was concerned, we residents could use the room to read in, or write in, to talk in, or even doze in. The smoking room had a bay window that enabled you to look along the street. I was thus conveniently placed to keep the school entrance under surveillance and to observe, unnoticed, all comings and goings. I took the opportunity to taste the first of the cigars I had been given by Wilhelm at the time of the truce.

  It was raining that day and the knot of mothers waiting for their children outside the school was smaller than usual. The news from the war was not encouraging just then. This was the time when the Czar in Russia had dismissed his chief of staff and tried to run the army himself—catastrophically. I’d had a letter from my sister in London. She was threatening to come and see me in Stratford. “You can’t help win this war in the boondocks, you know. There can’t be many German submarines in the river Avon. Come to London … there’s room in the flat and it will be just you and four girls!!!!!” Izzy had always been fond of exclamation marks. “It’s my favorite punctuation!!!” she would say when she wrote to me at school. Underlining came a close second.

  Three-thirty arrived. The children emerged, and the knot of mothers dissolved. Ten more minutes passed. I recognized one or two teachers hurrying home, a brave one on a bicycle.

  Then I saw Sam. She was wearing a navy blue raincoat, not so very different from those a lot of children wear, and a navy blue sou’wester hat. She looked very young. But the blue of her outfit emphasized the blond of the hair that fell about her shoulders.

  I let her go by the Lamb before I slipped out the side door. I stood under the arch at the side of the pub, out of the rain, and watched as Sam stepped into the grocery shop halfway along the Wellesbourne Road. She emerged a short time later, carrying a small parcel, but as she left the shop she turned and shouted something I didn’t catch. Although I didn’t hear clearly what was said, I sensed that Sam was upset as she hurried off, running across the road and turning right beyond the fountain where the market stalls were pitched on Tuesday mornings.

  I followed at a distance. The rain was insistent rather than heavy, but there were few people about. I reached the corner and looked down Newbold Lane. There were houses on either side and at the far end the lane rose where it crossed the canal and then the railway line—the station was at the far end of the village, beyond a warehouse belonging to a local brewery.

  Sam was on the bridge and disappearing over it. As soon as she was out of sight I hurried forward, not easy in the rain and given my limp, though the pain was getting easier day by day. Just as I reached the bridge a train rattled by, its smoke and steam billowing out either side of the engine, like a set of old-fashioned whiskers. The locomotive was slowing on its approach to Middle Hill station and for a moment the carriages obscured my view ahead. As they disappeared westward, however, I suddenly saw Sam again. She was standing on the far side of the canal at the door of a lockkeeper’s cottage, and she had inserted a key into the keyhole. She had turned, to watch the train, but that meant she was facing away from me and didn’t see me watching her. Then she let herself into the cottage and disappeared.

  I walked on. I could have asked almost anyone in the Lamb where Sam lived—it was a small village—but I didn’t want to advertise my interest in her. Beyond the canal and railway, Newbold Lane became much more of a lane than a road, narrowing to accommodate single-file traffic only, and its surface was more primitive, too—loose gravel. The lane led, I knew, to a pig farm and very soon would become lathered in mud and worse. The rain was heavier than before but I was well wrapped up and I resolved to walk as far as the mud before turning back. I was going to knock on Sam’s door—no time like the present—but I wanted her to get home, get out of her wet clothes, and relax first, before I arrived. I didn’t want her preoccupied when I made the little speech I had planned.

  My mind went back to the war. Recently the French had made a series of attacks on the Germans but had been rebuffed. One of the problems was an overall lack of strategy. General Joffre, commander in chief of the French forces, was a law unto himself and that only meant that the Allies, as a fighting unit, were less than the sum of their parts. It couldn’t go on and a summit was planned. The sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska had just been killed in a charge at Neuville-St.-Vaast.

  The mud on the road was thickening, as was the smell of pig. The shine on my shoes was definitely under threat, so I turned round. I was now walking into the rain, which sliced against my face like grains of shrapnel. As I came within sight of the bridge again, my heart did a somersault in my rib cage. A woman was walking along the towpath, away from the lockkeeper’s cottage. Was Sam going out again so soon? Had I missed her on my way to and from the pigs? Then I realized that the woman on the towpath was not Sam, and was probably no more than fifteen. In fact, I recognized her as one of the girls who sang in the Middle Hill church choir.

  She had her head down because of the rain and didn’t
see me. I let her get well out of sight; then I climbed down the steps off the bridge and continued on to the towpath. In the distance a narrow boat was gliding slowly toward the lock gates but it was minutes away. The raindrops pelted the surface waters of the canal in tiny explosions.

  I reached the cottage and pushed at the low gate. The hinge complained in a soft whine.

  I stood for a moment at the door before knocking. Did I really want to do what I was about to do? I heard a kettle whistling and I thought I heard a baby crying somewhere. Suddenly the smell from the pig farm wafted across the meadows and shook me into action.

  I knocked on the door.

  After a delay, Sam appeared. “Oh!” she gasped, obviously as surprised as I hoped she would be. “Oh.”

  “I hope I’m not intruding,” I said softly, taking off my hat, despite the rain. Cold water sluiced down the back of my neck.

  “No, oh no.” She had on a striped apron. “Put your hat back on, please, you’ll get soaked. How did you know where I lived?”

  “They know everything at the Lamb,” I lied, putting back my hat.

  I noticed that she didn’t ask me in. Was someone else there? I’d come too far to pull back now.

  “I wondered… there’s a dance in Stratford on Saturday, I thought you might like to go.”

  She looked at me without blinking.

  “Well,” I said, “I know dancing is not exactly my strong suit, not with this leg, but… there’ll be lots of people, a bar, music … it’s a change from village life. What do you think?”

  She bit her lip. “I can’t go out, not at night anyway.” Then she added in a half whisper, “No, not nights.”

  What did she mean by that? That she didn’t want to go out at all? That she didn’t want to go anywhere with me?

  The pig smell intensified.

  I tried again. “We could always go to Stratford for lunch, walk by the river. Visit Shakespeare’s grave—though I’m sure you’ve done that.” It sounded lame.