Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  And, of course, we talked.

  Sam talked about life in Bristol.

  “It’s a port, of course, which means there was no shortage of foreigners when we girls were growing up, and maybe that helped stoke my wanderlust. Early on, before he took to drink, our father told us lots of stories of far-off places—Lagos, Haifa, Montevideo. He had seen whales and crocodiles and polar bears. Imagine! He brought us dolls from Africa and jewelry from India.” She bit her lip in the way that she had. “After he turned to drink and violence, we tore the dolls apart and threw the jewelry in the river.”

  Sam spoke a little bit about her mother, and her mother’s singing voice, inherited by Lottie. “She knew so many prayers by heart, and so much poetry. The dresses she made were always meticulous—she invariably used the narrowest of ribbons, complicated stitches that few other people could do, and she chased all over the place for unusual silks and cottons; suppliers were always doing her favors because she was so pretty, and the dresses she made were so striking. And because of that, my sisters and I always won fancy-dress competitions at school. We became well known in the area where we lived because of the costumes our mother made.”

  She talked about how their father always blamed his wife for giving him four daughters and no sons. “Toward the end, or when he had been drinking, they argued about it, a lot, and it may have contributed to our father’s drinking. But that was an excuse in my view. On the other hand, I did—do—miss having a brother. At teacher training college, my best friend was close to her brother, and she made it sound fun, just as your relationship with Izzy sounds fun. A family of all girls can be a bit of a hothouse, an echo chamber of petty rivalries and grievances.”

  Did Sam want me as a brother? It crossed my mind, of course, but on our walks she would put her arm in mine, we would hold hands; we grew closer gradually.

  And we complemented each other. I knew a lot about science but, of course, Sam was very familiar with Shakespeare, his tragedies and comedies, his Iagos and Malvolios. She may not have seen the nightclubs of Munich or the trenches of Flanders, as I had, but her grasp of psychology was astute. Shakespeare had something to do with that.

  On weekdays, Lottie offered to babysit as often as we wanted. That’s when Sam and I went to the theater, to concerts, or to lectures at the Royal Institution or the great hospitals. And it was at one of the lectures in that spring of 1916 that Sam got talking to a woman who was a teacher. I never did know whether Sam offered her services or whether the woman, as Sam said, let slip that there was a vacancy at her school, and that Sam might just fill it.

  She didn’t say anything to me on the way home, or the next day, or the day immediately after that. But that Saturday, after Lottie had gone off to stay somewhere and we were taking Will for a walk (which is to say, I was pushing him along Chelsea Embankment), Sam said, “How would you feel if I went back to teaching?”

  I looked at her without saying anything for a moment. Will was gurgling away.

  “What about Will?”

  “Lottie says she’ll look after him.”

  “You’ve already discussed it with Lottie?” I was… I was out of sorts.

  “It was Lottie who gave me the idea.”

  “What!”

  Sam put her hand on my arm. “Don’t get angry. I’m trying to be helpful and practical here.”

  “Practical? How?” I remember that this was the first cross word I had exchanged with Sam.

  It didn’t last. She raised herself on tiptoe and kissed my cheek, even though we were in the street, in public. “Hal, you’ve been wonderful to … to Will, to me, to Lottie. We can’t go on just accepting your generosity—”

  “I don’t know why not—”

  “No!” She said it softly, but insistently.

  Will was looking up at us. The gurgling had stopped.

  “I love having a baby, Hal, I really do. But I miss teaching too. Lottie’s obviously not going to get a job anytime soon. The woman I met at the lecture the other night said there was a vacancy in their school and, well…”

  She faltered.

  “Well?” Why was I helping her out?

  “I went to see them yesterday.” She smiled. “The job is mine if I want it.”

  “Don’t they want references?” That was my second cross word.

  “They know the college where I trained, and it has a good name. I told them what happened at Middle Hill, and the headmistress was understanding. A big city like London is different—they have seen plenty of women made pregnant by soldiers. We are going to need all the people we can breed after the war. The headmistress said she doesn’t have to tell the rest of the staff but, so far as she is concerned, it won’t be a problem.”

  A horse-drawn cart went by and Will focused on that.

  “And did you tell them who Will’s father is?” I couldn’t help myself.

  Sam’s face flushed. “Of course not. I told them I was married now.” She still didn’t raise her voice, but put her arm in mine. “You’ve got a sister, Hal. I’ve never met her but I’ve read her letter and I’m sure I’d like her. You’d do a lot for her, wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, think of the situation from my point of view. If I work, there’ll be more money around and I’ll be able to pay something to Lottie, for looking after Will. She’ll have a bit of money to spend, to buy those books and magazines she likes, on the lives of the toffs, and she’ll feel more useful, she won’t feel she’s sponging off us—off you—all the time.”

  She squeezed my arm. “And I won’t become a drudge, weighed down by baby talk, baby habits, and baby timetables. And there’ll be less pressure on you—after all, he isn’t yours.”

  “Sam!” I shook myself free of her arm. Cross word number three. “How can you say that? I love Will—doesn’t it show? Do you mean you want me to spend less time with him? What are you saying?”

  Will had his attention back on us now.

  “I didn’t mean it like that, Hal. Don’t react so.”

  “Well, what did you mean?”

  She reached out again and took my hand. “It just seemed… it seemed like a good solution all round, that’s all. It will be like when we first met—”

  “No, it won’t! Not at all. Don’t you like the way things are?”

  “Yes—yes, I do! Don’t react so, Hal.”

  I noticed she didn’t attempt to cancel the plan.

  There was a silence between us.

  Then she went on: “I don’t want anything to change between us, Hal. But you’re doing interesting work, and I want to do something too. Actually, it was that letter from your sister that set me thinking. She’s more or less my age, and she’s doing something useful, worthwhile. I can’t just spend my hours with Will—I have to … I have to be more active. Remember our conversation in that station in Birmingham? When I said I wanted to get more involved in the war? I’ve rather let that drop since we’ve moved to London, but I haven’t changed my view. Teaching in a poor area is more useful than teaching in Middle Hill and it’s something I know. Also, the school has a lot of projects linked to the war, so I can be more involved, as involved as I want to be. You don’t mind that, do you? You’re doing important work now.”

  “Lots of women see raising children as a full-time job.”

  “If we had more than one, maybe …”

  She said it softly, but it still cut right through me. I know I flushed. “I did tell you before—”

  “Yes, you did, Hal. You’ve done nothing wrong. Nothing, nothing. I’m not criticizing you—how could I, after all you have given me. That evening, in the cricket field, when you asked me to come to London, you did say I could go back to teaching.”

  We walked on. Not very far, and then we turned back. Our appetites for fresh air had evaporated. Mine certainly had. But what she said was true. I had promised she could go back to teaching.

  On the way back, after several hundred yards of silence, during which ti
me even Will thought it safer to fall asleep, I said, “Where is this school?”

  “Notting Hill.”

  “When do they want you to start?”

  Without looking at me, she said, “I can start on Monday if I want.”

  “Does that suit Lottie?”

  She nodded.

  “So it’s all signed and sealed.”

  “I’ll be paid four pounds, six shillings a week, Hal. We can do a lot with that.”

  “We don’t need money—”

  “Lottie does, and I’d like some of my own too. I’d like to buy you presents, for instance, with my own money.”

  “I don’t need—”

  “But I want to give them to you.”

  We went to bed that night in silence. It was a first. While Sam was still in the bathroom, I put down my book, turned off my bedside lamp, and lay on my side, with my back to where Sam slept. I heard her come out of the bathroom, smelled the sweep of her as she got into bed and switched off her light. Suddenly I felt her body against mine and she kissed the back of my neck. As she kissed me a second time, I realized that she wasn’t wearing her nightdress.

  Dear Hal,

  Short note. Just moving from Place A to Place B—can’t say where, of course, but you know that. Did you go and see Ma and Pa yet? If not, you’re a beast. I can’t go, so you must.

  Yesterday, we actually had a visit from a theater troupe—Todd Makepiece being the big name. Maybe you’ve heard of him (I hadn’t). Anyway, they did Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest—very funny, very silly, and very English, all cucumber sandwiches and railway stations and eccentric vicars. Everyone loved it. Will that England ever come back, once all this is over? I doubt it.

  Two of the women in the cast were very beautiful. It must be satisfying being an actress, and it will still be satisfying after the war. I wonder if what I do will still be as satisfying, or as important, after the war is over? Yes, your little sister is getting philosophical. Better stop. Hundred and thousands of love,

  Izzy

  The Sunday after the night Sam and I first made love we went to take a look at the school in Notting Hill where she was scheduled to teach—I wanted to know what sort of place it was, what sort of life Sam would be taking on. We walked some of the way but there was a new motorbus route that went up Kensington Church Street. We took Will and Whisky.

  The school, when we reached it, could hardly have been more different from Middle Hill. It was surrounded by high wire netting, part of it was next to a railway bridge, and part was edged by a canal, marked off by a row of palings in disarray. Rural it was not.

  I pointed to the canal, the railway bridge. “You don’t object to all this?”

  “We’re in the middle of London, Hal, not Middle Hill. The children here need educating just as much as there. Maybe more so.”

  Children were playing in the playground, even though it was Sunday. The wire fencing was far from complete. They were scruffy children, dirty even. I wasn’t happy.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Sam. My mother would call this the rough end of town.”

  “Oh, it’s rough, all right. That’s part of the attraction for me.” She slipped her arm through mine. “When am I going to meet your mother, by the way?”

  I was long overdue for a visit to my parents. I had not kept my promise, to Izzy, that I would get in touch with them more often.

  “Don’t change the subject,” I said, but I squeezed her arm. They would have to meet Sam soon.

  When Lottie came back to the flat that night, I could see she was nervous. She knew what had been going on and wasn’t sure how I would react. She was, however, ambushed by Sam.

  “It’s all settled—Hal has agreed.”

  That considerably exaggerated what we had worked out—that I had agreed to a month’s trial, in case the whole thing turned out to be a disaster. Sam glossed over that, and Lottie burst out smiling, in relief. As on a previous occasion, she rushed across to me and gave me a big kiss.

  I have always liked numbers. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s their precision, the lack of doubt associated with them. Many words, certainly, are worryingly vague, ambiguous, or malleable—“justice,” for example, or “God;” above all, “love.” I mention this because it was my love of numbers that led me, in April of 1916, to spend time on the pages of German newspapers that few of the others in the Gym chose to linger over. I am talking about the financial pages and, in particular, the tables of stocks and shares. I concentrated on companies in the science and technology sector of the market.

  Before the war, our family firm had published a book, a very technical book, by a German physicist, about tides, the nature of water flow, and the various tide races around the world. I knew, because it said so on the title page of the book, that he was a consultant to the Bremerhaven engineering firm of STG, the See-Technik Gesellschaft, or Maritime Engineering Company. A few months after I had settled in at Northumberland Avenue, I happened to notice STG in the stock exchange listings of the Berliner Zeitung. Their shares had risen by two marks the previous day.

  Now, this was a small thing in itself but it opened up a whole new world for me. I had assumed, I suppose—though in truth I hadn’t really given any thought to it at all—that most if not all firms did badly in wartime. But, of course, a moment’s reflection will tell you that such an idea is naïve. If you make uniforms, or weapons, or military ships, or medals, or coffins, or ammunition, or prayer books, or crosses for graves, your services are going to be in demand.

  And that is what I noticed about STG: their share price was very healthy indeed. We didn’t hang on to outdated newspapers in the Gym; they were shipped to the basement, where they were held for a while, then destroyed. Down in the basement, I found earlier copies of the Berliner Zeitung, and of other German papers that also carried stock exchange listings. Using these various titles I was able to plot the share price of STG over the previous four months. And very interesting reading it made.

  I wasn’t at my best that day—I thought I was coming down with a cold—but I showed the figures to Sheila and we discussed it with the team leader from the economics table. He agreed that my reasoning was sound, so Sheila and I went to see Pritchard.

  “Yes?” he said, waving us to a seat, though Sheila, as before, preferred the radiator.

  I took a sheaf of clippings from a folder I had created.

  “Give me the headline,” he said. “We’re all busy, Hal, and we trust you.”

  “Not this time, sir.” I sniffled as I said this. “You’ll want to see the raw material for yourself.”

  He leaned forward and opened the file. “Stock prices? What is this?”

  I gave him some background. “In 1912, our family firm published a book by a certain Ulrich Pöhl, a hydrologist, I suppose you’d call him. An expert on water, anyway—on tides, forces in water, underwater currents, hard science. He was a consultant to a Bremerhaven firm,” I said and I explained about STG. “For that reason, I’ve always taken an interest in the company, and when I came to the Gym I looked it up.” I pointed to the cuttings in the file. “I’ve been following it intermittently and if you go through those lists, you’ll see that, over the past four months, the engineering sector has risen by, roughly speaking, two percent. STG, on the other hand, is up twenty-three percent. Something’s going on there, and people in the know are buying shares.”

  Pritchard put on his spectacles and started going through the figures. He sniffed once or twice and licked his finger, to flick through the cuttings, but otherwise said nothing. Eventually he was done.

  “You’re right about the share price. What’s your analysis?”

  I glanced at Sheila. She smiled encouragingly.

  “STG is a Bremerhaven-based shipbuilding company with a hydrologist as a consultant. I’d say that points to submarines. Either STG have invented something new—a faster, deeper, deadlier sub— or they’ve got a big order to expand production.”
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br />   Pritchard was scribbling notes. “You’ve run this by the economics people?”

  “Yes sir.” Sheila was lighting a cigarette.

  “There’s no way of telling, I suppose, which of those scenarios is the right one?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But Pöhl’s book came out in 1912. You could have our hydrologists check out what research he was doing in the years before the war—it might give us a clue. Also, you might have people check out the acknowledgments page in the book—he mentions by name other specialists he showed the manuscript to. Those names can be checked out as well. They might lead somewhere.”

  He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.

  “But we must have people on the ground in Hamburg, sir,” I added. “That’s still the best way forward.”

  Pritchard was cleaning his spectacles with his handkerchief. “I was in Bremerhaven once, years ago. Not my favorite port, I must say.” He inspected the glass of his spectacles for dust and smears. “Submarines terrify me—I’d hate to be cooped up in a metal tube, all those feet below the surface, not knowing if, all of a sudden—wham!” He took an empty card folder from a drawer in his desk. “Well done, Hal. How’s the limp?”

  “Getting better all the time, thank you, sir.”

  “You’ll keep an eye on the STG share price, yes?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Maybe I should buy some shares myself.”

  He grinned.

  Later that week, I fell ill. It was a severe bout of flu but I was bad enough to have to stay in bed for two days. And so, very quickly, I came to rely on Lottie, who was, of course, at home looking after Will. He moved around the flat in spurts now. Having just learned to walk, after a fashion, his habit was to run faster than his coordination allowed, so that every few paces he fell over and he would bawl out for a few seconds. Then, when no one took any notice—Lottie was very good like that—the bawling stopped, grunting and panting took over, and the serious business of getting back upright was begun, while he babbled to himself in some incomprehensible protolanguage. Whisky steered clear whenever these commotions were in progress.