Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  But she was nodding. “Yes, yes, I’d like that. The river there … it’s where—” She trailed off, but I knew what she’d almost said. It was where she and Wilhelm had courted, back in the spring of 1914.

  That told me… not a lot, exactly, but enough for now. Don’t rush your fences, I reminded myself.

  “How are you on motorbikes?” I said.

  “What?”

  I raised my voice above the rain. “I have a motorbike.”

  “Oh no, far too dangerous. I mean, I’ve never been on one, but I’ve seen them. They go so fast—thirty miles an hour even. Oh no. Especially now that—” She checked herself, and I didn’t press it.

  “Let’s take the train,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the station at eleven-thirty.”

  “You don’t want me to come for you here?”

  “No. Meet me at the station at half past. Don’t worry, I won’t be late.” She half-closed the door. It was clear that this was a dismissal. She smiled, closed the door fully, and immediately opened it again. “Thank you,” she said in a whisper. And then the door was closed a second time.

  I have said next to nothing about my German course at Stratford. Housed in an old agricultural college on Wood Street, the language school had been operated as a private outfit in the days of Wilhelm Wetzlar, when its chief job was to teach German and other languages to graduates who had obtained a scholarship to study at European universities, such as Göttingen, Heidelberg, Paris, and Bologna. And to teach English to foreigners. On the outbreak of fighting, the War Ministry had taken it over. The school now taught interpreters, interrogators, propaganda people, translators, budding spies, would-be diplomats—anyone with a gift for languages whose talent might come in useful at some stage (there was no strategy so far as I could see). There were fewer women in the course than I’d expected after reading the Ministry of War brochure I had been sent by the London bookseller. The men were mainly army, with a few naval types thrown in. One or two were, like me, injured.

  The “Ag,” as it was called, was built on three floors and must have been quite old, for it was very short of staircases. In fact, had it not been for the war, I am sure it would have been closed down as a fire risk. There were, naturally, no lifts and only one of the new telephone machines: in the office belonging to the director of studies, so it was hardly accessible. Built of stone, the whole building echoed—a cough barreled down the corridors like the clap of a shell at the Front. The canteen, on the ground floor, stank of brown food—brown soup, brown meat (though that’s being kind; it was often gray), brown onions, brown sausages. Fortunately, Stratford was well endowed with pubs. A cricket team had been formed but my limp ruled me out other than as an umpire, which didn’t appeal.

  Because of my two years in Germany I was entered in the senior course of advanced technical German, learning specialist scientific, economic, geographical, and military terms. The idea was that, with my military experience and my language proficiency, I would eventually be attached to the general staff of some forward unit, translating captured documents or even interrogating prisoners. I didn’t object: it would impress my father and seemed useful enough work for a wreck with a limp.

  I settled in fairly well, the only problem—which we all faced— being a certain Major George Romford, second-in-command and director of studies. He had a blue chin where, however close he shaved, the follicles fought back, giving him a stubble that never quite went away. He had a mustache like a brush, which, I suspect, camouflaged a harelip. And he had the largest Adam’s apple I have ever seen—it must have been the size of a duck’s egg. Whenever he spoke, it did a jig in his throat and I couldn’t take my eyes off it, except to notice that his shoes could have been shinier.

  Major Romford was an old-fashioned class warrior who had been born into a docker’s family in the East End of London and, to his credit, had worked his way up. He had obtained a brilliant degree at London University, spoke three languages other than English, and looked upon anyone who hadn’t been born in the rough end of town and gone to his beloved “school of hard knocks” as a weakling in need of building up through a regime of being pulled down. The translations, pronunciation, and sentence construction of someone like me were never good enough for George Romford, even though we both knew that I spoke German with a better accent and a greater natural fluency than he did, which was a cause of bitterness on his part. (He had learned his German in school and had never been abroad, so it wasn’t surprising that I had the better accent and usage, but that of course never came into his calculations.) He particularly hated me, not only because of my superior accent and because I hadn’t grown up in a tenement or the workhouse but also because I had my own transport and so could get away from the college (and him) with unparalleled speed and efficiency. I spent my time at the Ag dodging Romford and avoiding his eye whenever he gave a class. He was particularly smarmy in his dealings with women, and that didn’t endear him to me either.

  Despite this drawback, I did learn some technical German on the course, enjoyed it, and even found some books on German science and history in the Stratford library that helped fill me in on the general background to the technical terms I was learning.

  On Saturday morning Sam and I met as arranged on the platform of Middle Hill station. (There was only one platform for both the “up” and “down” trains.) She was on time as she had promised; I bought the tickets and we stood awkwardly together, waiting for the train. The sun was out, the birds were near deafening, and though I felt awkward I was in a good mood. I’d been for a walk that morning (my limp was improving all the time) and had picked a buttercup for my buttonhole.

  Sam looked a picture. She wore a pale blue woollen coat, with a matching Alice band. If anything, she was more beautiful than on any of the previous occasions I had seen her.

  Before I could say anything, two young children—who had spotted her before I had—rushed up to her.

  “Miss! Miss! We’re going to Bristol, like you said,” shouted one breathlessly.

  “Our Colin’s a sailor on a boat,” chorused the other.

  “He’s going off somewhere secret and we’re saying good-bye.”

  Sam was sitting on her haunches, down at their level. “Now calm down, Maureen. Don’t shout, Brian.”

  She was back in her playground role, as I had seen her the very first time. Friendly, but firm.

  She looked up at me and smiled, as she listened to what they had to say. They had obeyed her instantly, crowding closer to her and talking away nonstop, but much more quietly now. As the signal clanked down and the hiss of the train could be heard, they broke off and ran back to their parents, along the platform.

  Sam stood up.

  “What was that all about?”

  She took a handkerchief from her bag and wiped her lips. “I have a thing about travel. I’ve always wanted to visit every place on earth and now, with this war on, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. I was reading to the class the other day, from a travel book, and we were talking about far-off places. I said everyone should travel, as soon as they could, as far as they could. They have the chance to go to Bristol—that’s a long way for them—and they wanted me to know.”

  “They’re going to Bristol and back by train?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Poor mites—they’ll probably fall fast asleep in class on Monday, but they’ll have seen Bristol. All the other children will want to know what it’s like. Maureen and Brian will be … what’s the word, what do they call Mary Pickford? A star, that’s it. They’ll be stars for a day.” She smiled again.

  The 11:38 moved off at 11:48 and, soon after we left the station, the train passed the lockkeeper’s cottage where Sam lived. I was surprised to see, standing outside the cottage and waving, the young girl I’d observed when I’d called on Sam, the girl who sang in the choir. That set me thinking.

  The train wasn’t busy and we had a compartment to ourselves. Sam unbuttoned her coat and sat back in her seat.
As the train picked up speed and the smell of smoke from the engine came at us in wafts, she pointed out various villages we passed: Charlecote, Littleham Bridge, Avoncliffe. The line crisscrossed the green-dark waters of the Warwickshire canals a few times, and she knew their names as well. Her body, under her coat, was more than a match for the countryside.

  “Have you been sailing on the canals?”

  “Of course, many times. But it’s a bit slow for me. I like speed.”

  Why hadn’t she wanted to go on my motorbike, I wondered.

  At Stratford we got off and Sam waved to the children who were going on to Bristol. Away from the station, we decided to have a walk around town to begin with, to work up an appetite, then have lunch at a pub we both knew, the Crown, and take a longer walk by the river in the afternoon. I knew the main streets of Stratford pretty well by now, but Sam knew the back alleys and mews, the secret yards and dead ends where many of the older establishments were to be found— blacksmiths, stables, foundries, saddlers. The road led us by the ferry, past a church and a water mill. I noticed the high proportion of women working in the blacksmiths and in the foundry—the men, I assumed, were away fighting. It may sound odd, but at times I was grateful for my limp. It explained why I wasn’t abroad, doing my bit.

  At one point we stopped off at a small mews house that, according to the sign outside, was a woodworker’s shop. “Come on, look inside,” said Sam. “This is where to come if you ever need a new walking stick—or a wooden leg.” She flashed me a grin.

  I did as I was told.

  Inside, there were three men working—one man and two boys, really. But they were not what drew the eye. What you couldn’t help but notice was what was on the walls. Those walls, made of old, long, brown bricks, were covered in every type of tool you could imagine. All pegged to the brickwork in a neat arrangement, each with its place—where the workmen knew how to find them—were the most beautifully crafted implements: planes, in shiny polished wood, bradawls, bodkins, drills, awls, hammers with different kinds of heads, prongs, small pickaxes, knives of varied shapes and sizes, chisels, spokeshaves, cleavers, adzes, whittles, naked blades, and rasps. The overall effect was like the huge abstract collages I had seen in Munich.

  “How did you stumble across this?” I asked.

  “There’s a woodwork teacher in school. He brought me here. I love tidiness. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  “Not in Stratford,” I said. “Someday I’ll tell you about my time in Munich. But this is stunning, stunning.”

  We waved good-bye to the three men.

  Gradually, we worked our way back to the Crown. Sam knew one of the waitresses there, who was introduced to me as Maude, and she gave us a good table with a view of the yard, where, in the old days, the coaches would have unloaded. The yard contained a number of barrels—empty, I presumed—which were waiting to be exchanged for full ones the next time the brewery made a delivery.

  There wasn’t much choice on the lunch menu—it was wartime, after all—but it was a good deal less brown than the canteen at the Ag and I remember the hotel actually served a fish course after the soup: very civilized.

  I don’t remember too much about the Crown itself on that occasion because by now I was totally smitten with Sam. I have only fallen in love once in my life and it happened immediately, totally, and right there in the back alleys and dead ends of Stratford. Sam, I realized, was trying to keep her distance even as I was trying to get closer. As we had poked about the hidden side of Stratford she’d spoken as if she were a guide and I a paying tourist. Had she given Wilhelm this treatment to begin with? I put it out of my mind. During our “tour” there were no intimate little glances or smiles, there was no squeeze of my arm, no physical contact of any kind. But I could tell she was not indifferent to me either. She was seeing how I responded to what she had to say, how I dealt with the difficulties she was putting in my way. And yes, she was a bit shy. I was just glad to be with her.

  Before lunch we both had a sherry. With the food I had a pint of bitter and she drank shandy—half beer, half lemonade. By now she had taken off her coat, to reveal underneath a white frock, buttoned down the front. When she shook off her coat, she also released more perfume. This, plus the fact that the frock was a shade—though no more than a shade—too small for her, was the most alluring experience I think I had ever had to that point, not excluding the Eleven Executioners cabaret in Munich, or Crimson. It was, conceivably, the most erotic moment of my life.

  During the first part of lunch she said it was my turn to talk, that she was talked out after our tour of the town. I wasn’t sure that was the truth—she was still keeping a distance from me—but I was happy to let it go. So I did what lovers (or would-be lovers) do at times like that. I gave her my life story, or an edited version of it, designed to make her think well of me.

  I told her how I had grown up in the Cotswolds, not on a farm exactly—we lived in a large house next to the church in a small hamlet—but otherwise surrounded by farmland and the beech woods of the wolds.

  “So, from an early age I was familiar with which mushrooms could be eaten and which toadstools were poisonous, where the badgers came out at night, and where the bluebells formed their plush, iridescent carpet in spring. I remember even today the damp smell of bluebells in the beech woods in late April—I was so familiar with those beech woods, and so familiar a sight there myself, that even the foxes learned to recognize me and stopped being afraid.

  “In the summer the foliage of the beech trees formed great cathedral-shaped spaces high above, bathed in a green-golden light, through which sunbeams sliced down in dramatic diagonal shafts. At other times of the year, when it was cold and it rained, my sister and I would bend twigs into a hoop and collect wet—or, better still, frosted—cobwebs from the hedgerows, so that they formed intricate, beautiful lacework patterns that we held up to the light. Endless streams cut through the wolds, in deep, secret folds, where water rats, moorhens, and the occasional snake could be glimpsed.

  “Everyone—all the local children, anyway—knew in which field the farmer kept his bull and for us younger ones—admonished sternly to keep away—that only made that field seem lusher, greener, more mysterious, and altogether more desirable than all the other fields put together. The iron fence to the field contained a kissing gate. This kept the bull in but didn’t keep us children out when there weren’t any adults about. We devised a daring game in which the aim was to see how long we could stay in the forbidden field before the bull saw us, or smelled us, and came looking, first at a trot, then, as he got closer, at a rush (we called the game ‘Bullrush’). Then you scampered back through the kissing gate and taunted the bull from safety. I remember we once stayed in the field until we had counted to four hundred and forty-four, a magic number for my sister and me ever afterward. Then I was given my first pocket watch and we timed how long we could remain in the field. It wasn’t the same, and soon afterward we began to lose interest.

  “The vicar in our village had five daughters and a big scandal arose when one of them was made pregnant by a local farmhand.” Sam’s cheeks reddened, but I pressed on. “She was fifteen at the time, a year older than me, and my secret shame and embarrassment was that I had once kissed her, in the back corridor of the dark and rambling vicarage. I later found out that she kissed anybody and everybody, but at the time I remember being worried sick that I had made her pregnant by that illicit kiss. But the police never came looking for me and after a while my guilty feelings subsided. The daughter was taken away and I never saw her again, much to my regret. I had enjoyed that kiss and would have risked it again.

  “My sister was two years younger than me and we always did everything together—well, she didn’t kiss the vicar’s daughter, obviously. I was the leader in all games and expeditions and she was content to be my trusty lieutenant.”

  “What’s your sister’s name?” said Sam, between mouthfuls.

  “Isobel. Izzy.” />
  “Was she a tomboy?”

  “Not really. Why do you ask?”

  “One of my sisters was a tomboy—always bullying the rest of us and leading us into scrapes.”

  “No, Izzy was—is—really quite feminine. Not a tomboy at all. She’s become a bit of a bully now, though. She’s a nurse, or training to be. Bossiness seems to go with the job.”

  “Will she join up? You can travel as a nurse, especially in wartime. Teachers don’t get to travel.” She made a face. “Sorry for interrupting. Go on.”

  “I don’t know what my sister has planned. She’s been living in London and we’ve lost touch a bit. But we used to be close.”

  And I told Sam about the first expedition my sister and I embarked on, if you can call it that. It occurred when I was about seven and Isobel was five, when we were allowed to sleep out in a tent in the garden overnight. “We lit a fire, with the aid of our parents, and cooked—or, rather, burned, cremated, sacrificed, incinerated—some sausages, which we then nibbled and pretended that we were enjoying. Isobel was a bit frightened by the owls later in the night and, to tell the gospel truth, so was I. But I played the big brother role to perfection, and we fell asleep with our arms around each other, inside the same sleeping bag.

  “Our biggest expedition was to watch the Severn Bore. The river Severn was about ten miles from where we lived and at certain times of the year, especially in the spring and autumn, when tides were strong in the Bristol Channel, a wave, about four feet high, was produced by the sharp narrowing of the channel, and moved steadily up the river, certainly as far as Sharpness and maybe even farther, for all I know. People traveled for miles around to see the bore, but for children the game was to sit somewhere on the bank where you were at risk of being caught by the wave, and then play “Chicken.” You sat or stood on the bank until the last possible moment, before the wave got you— and then you ran. Oh, how you ran! The last person to move won.