Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  I lay in bed, doing my best to sleep through his noise. I had a mild fever but nothing serious enough to trouble a doctor with. When Sam came back from school, she was alarmed to find me home and in bed on the first day, and fussed over me as if she were a nurse and not a teacher.

  “When any of us caught the flu in Bristol,” she told me, “we were given a sip of whisky, hot water, honey, and lemon juice. It made us sweat and sometimes it worked.” She smiled. “That started to annoy our father, too. He said it was a waste of good whisky. Can you imagine anything more beastly, putting himself before his young daughters. What a man!”

  Lottie came in very useful that day, I have to admit. Sam had found her first days at school harder than she had anticipated. Not hard physically, but hard emotionally. Unlike in Middle Hill, several of the children at the new school, St. Paul’s Ladbroke Grove, had lost fathers in the war. As a result, they were disturbed, their families were broken, and poverty was an issue that it had never been in Middle Hill. Children arrived at school unwashed, unfed, and, in one or two cases, unshod.

  “They’re bewildered, Hal. You and I and Izzy have a problem understanding this war—think what it must be like for them. History, literature, and mathematics seem pretty useless, a long way from real life.”

  “Why not try some war poetry on them?” I said. (This was before I fell ill.) “One of the women at work is forming a collection—let me get some references for you.”

  “Oh, Hal, what a lovely idea. There’s quite a good bookshop in Notting Hill—if you get me a few titles, I’ll know what to ask for.”

  But the next day I was busy with the STG business. Then I fell ill, and so hadn’t been able to keep my promise.

  That night Sam cooked me some broth and gave me another finger of Bell’s, hot water, and honey—though there weren’t any lemons in the shops. I couldn’t finish all the soup but the toddy went down in no time, and helped me sleep. Sam slept in a different room that night. I could understand, but I missed her. I was getting used to sharing a bed with her and not just because we were now man and wife in the full sense. We both found it comforting. I know because I overheard Sam and Lottie talking about it one time.

  The next morning when I woke up, Sam had already left for school.

  I still didn’t feel good, and I had a bad headache, but I knew from past experience that I would feel a whole lot better if I had a shave. Nursing my head, I got out of bed and went through into the corridor. The bathroom was two doors along, beyond the lavatory. There were no locks on any of the doors and, too late, I realized the bathroom was already occupied. Lottie had just stepped out of the bath and was toweling herself dry. As the door opened, she stopped rubbing herself and just stood there, totally naked, looking at me.

  Then she stepped forward and kissed me.

  Though undeniably flattered by Lottie’s attentions, I was also profoundly shocked, and shied away as fast as I could, retreating to my bedroom—unshaven—where I remained for the rest of the morning. Lottie did not pursue me.

  The next day, Lottie herself went down with the same flu bug I had—and so did Will. The entire population of the flat in Penrith Mansions, save for Sam, was laid low. Lottie wasn’t shamming. I heard via Sam that her nose was streaming, her joints were aching, and she had a fever—all the symptoms I had. Amid this chaos, of course, Sam had to take some days off from work and minister to the rest of us.

  It never rains but it pours, they say, and while the flat was little more than a ward in a hospital, Sam’s second sister, Faye, turned up. I didn’t know it at the time—I was still ill and the news was kept from me. Only when I was on the mend, and the variety of voices and other noises in the flat could no longer be kept from me, was I put in the picture. As with Lottie, Faye had lost her job. As with Lottie, she had been unfortunate. She had worked in a park in North London, as a gardener, but the park had been requisitioned by the army for the duration, as a munitions and supplies dump, and the park was a garden no more. As with Lottie, Faye had been living in rented accommodations, her wages had been too low for her to build up any savings, and there wasn’t much call for gardeners in central London in wartime.

  One of the voices I had heard when I had been recovering from the flu, and knew that changes were happening without knowing what exactly, was male. This was explained now, in that Faye had arrived with her boyfriend, Tony. Tony was in basic training and about to be sent to France at any moment. He and Faye weren’t living together— he was stationed in some barracks just off Sloane Square, which was an added reason why Faye wanted to live with us, to be near her man. All of which meant that Tony was at the flat as much as possible. That made five adults, plus Will and Whisky. What had been a flat, then a hospital ward, was now more like a railway station.

  Here’s the thing, though: I enjoyed it. Put it down to growing up with parents who were distant, or to the fact that I was besotted with Sam—whatever the reason, I liked living in a railway station. I didn’t mind that the bathroom was permanently occupied and decorated with so much drying laundry that it put one in mind of flags at a regatta, or that the gas meter ate shillings as fast as Will acquired scratches and bruises.

  By the time Will, Lottie, and I had recovered from the flu (Sam, miraculously, never succumbed), days had passed since the incident in the bathroom. Lottie and I never discussed it, and there was no repeat. Part of me wondered what, exactly, Lottie had meant by her gesture, and pondered what one sister would do to another, but I never pursued the thought.

  Faye, as I think I’ve said, was the second oldest of the four sisters. (Ruth, thank God, had a good job—as senior seamstress in a uniform factory—so there was absolutely no chance she would be asking to join us at Penrith Mansions.) Tall and slender, Faye lived life out loud. She was passionate, or at least emotional, about everything—about men, about children, about makeup, about politics (she was an ardent socialist), and, inevitably, about the war. Which meant that Faye was the one sister who had—or at least voiced—strong feelings about Germans as the enemy. She kept these feelings under wraps, as best she could, when she was in the flat, and I never could tell whether she approved of Sam and me living together. But, once or twice, I caught her looking at Will in a way that suggested she didn’t entirely approve of Sam’s behavior. She never said anything in my presence, not at the time anyway, but then she was living in a room that I was paying for, so she was very careful—polite and considerate—where I was concerned.

  Tony’s presence didn’t help. He was a couple of years younger than me and came from Essex. He had shiny black hair, kept firmly in place by too much cream for my taste. He was slight and his uniform always seemed a shade too big for him—the arms of his tunic too long, the neck of his shirt collar too loose. Whenever I was in the flat he questioned me closely about the war, about what the Front was really like, what the casualty rates were, where exactly I had been hit and what the pain had been like and how long it had lasted. I came to the conclusion that he was frightened.

  “Don’t say that!” said Faye in her typically emotional way. “You make him sound like a coward.”

  “No, Faye.” We were in the kitchen when this exchange took place, where Sam was cooking and Lottie and I were shelling peas, before lunch. “Being frightened is the only sensible reaction to this war. It will make him respectful, careful… and it may well keep him alive.”

  That Tony was frightened was reinforced when he came round one day not long afterward and said, in a subdued way, that his unit had been earmarked for France and had been told to be ready to ship out in ten days’ time. He took Faye out dancing that night, they came back late and very obviously drunk, and he stayed the night. I didn’t know whether he was breaking the rules of his unit, in staying out overnight, and it certainly wasn’t my job to interfere, but when they appeared the next morning, a Sunday, they were engaged, and so everything was forgiven. Faye had a ring and I said that, provided Tony wasn’t thrown in military jail for staying ou
t overnight, we would have a celebration that evening.

  If Tony had broken this or that regulation, his engagement seemed to soften military hearts as much as it had softened Sam and Lottie’s and we had the celebration as planned. Which is to say, I bought some whisky for the men and some gin for the women and we all got drunk, not just the happy couple.

  Twelve days later, Tony’s unit did ship out and Faye, histrionic as ever, spent two days crying. Ruth came to the rescue, with the offer of a job in the uniform factory. Faye didn’t move out, but she did begin to pay rent.

  Dear Hal,

  I’m at a place that the censors won’t let me name but I’ve asked them and I can say that it begins with an “S.” Someday S. will be known around the world. It’s never been the first place where you would wish to spend your holidays, even if you could afford “abroad;” but I know where it is and I know what happened there. Tens of thousands were killed in a few hours!!

  I tell you, Hal, this war—horrific in so many different ways—is stretching my ability to describe how terrible it is. And that’s because we’re having experiences we lack the language for. Or, more accurately perhaps, we are having to use language in ways it was never intended, just as we are having to think in categories for which there are no categories.

  Take, for example, the reason I’m here: blood transfusion. When you train, you think of blood in terms of cubic centimeters, as something that fills a syringe or a test tube. If you prick a finger with a needle, or your nose bleeds, even though we say the blood “gushed” we don’t really mean it, do we? Maybe two cc’s are involved.

  Already, in blood transfusion, we are dealing in pints!! But at S., even that way of thinking went out the window. Sixty thousand men were killed on the first morning!!! I’ll repeat that, in figures: 60,000. Three times that number were injured. Half of those needed blood transfusions. 90,000 pints of blood, at least. Eleven thousand gallons. Of course, we didn’t have it. Where I was we had run out by ten-thirty that morning. We took another delivery about four in the afternoon, but had run out again by six-fifteen.

  Here is an incident typical of what we had to do at S. all day long. A young boy—I remember he was called Sandy—was blinded by shrapnel. He had a white label looped in the second buttonhole of his tunic. That meant he’d been injured in the battle and had priority for treatment. We cleaned his wounds, gave him some morphine for the pain, and bandaged his eyes. Before he was shipped back to the hospital tent at the rear of the lines, I asked him, gently, if he minded if we took some blood from his arm. He said that if it would help save other men, then of course we could take it. I went to get my equipment. When I came back, Sandy had cut through his own carotid artery with his knife. He didn’t want to live. The blood was still gushing out of him—and this time I mean gushing. Hal, I didn’t know whether to stanch his wound or collect the blood that was pulsing out of him!!

  I miss you, Hal. (I miss a good old-fashioned G&T too, but, you’ll be pleased to hear, I miss you more!) At night, when the shooting stops, and when the sky is clear, I look up at the stars. The stars are the only things that the war hasn’t disfigured or obliterated. I think of our night under the stars, when we slept out in the garden at home and pretended to enjoy the sausages we had fried to a cinder But I mustn’t get nostalgic or sentimental. There’s no place for that here. Tomorrow won’t be any better than today. All we can hope for is rain. There is too much blood in the soil to be washed away in any other fashion.

  Izzy

  Spending days reading the German newspapers, looking out for something potentially significant, one naturally encountered a lot of irrelevant information and pointless detail: sporting results, gardening tips, the bridge column, birth announcements. But then, one day, I came across something that had nothing to do with intelligence but was of great interest to me. It was an article in the FAZ. about the Thirty-second Saxon Regiment—Wilhelm’s unit. It wasn’t military information, of course; that wouldn’t have been allowed. The article didn’t say what had happened to the regiment, or where it was—nothing like that. It simply said that a unit from the regiment had won that year’s drill competition. The Germans helped to maintain morale by drill competitions, to which the public were invited. The crisp maneuverings of the companies taking part thrilled the public and boosted their morale as well as the troops’. And this year a unit from the Saxon Regiment had won.

  This told me nothing about Wilhelm, of course, nothing at all. No names were mentioned. But it put him in my mind. To tell the truth, given my living circumstances he was never very far away, but seeing the name of his regiment in print gave me a jolt. In particular, I realized that his photograph was still in my wallet. I was suddenly worried that Sam would find it and so, that very evening, I transferred the photograph from my wallet to the briefcase I took to work. I had told Sam and Lottie that I had signed the Official Secrets Act and that my briefcase was therefore off-limits so far as they were concerned, that I could be sacked, fined, or charged with treason and sentenced to death if I violated the Official Secrets Act, especially in wartime, and they accepted that. The briefcase was safe and so was I. I could have destroyed the photograph, of course, but I didn’t. I didn’t want my memory of Wilhelm to fade; it kept me on my toes. And without him I would never have met Sam. His photograph rooted me to the Front, reminded me that I had been at the sharp end and that, in a sense, I had earned Sam.

  About a week or so after Faye began work at the uniform factory, under Ruth, we were sitting at the dinner table when Lottie said, “Faye! What’s happened to your engagement ring—where is it?”

  Faye looked flustered and blushed. She stood up. “Oh, I took it off when I had a bath and forgot to put it back on again.” She slipped out of her chair. “I’ll get it.”

  While she was gone, Lottie made a face at Sam. “I don’t believe that story for a moment, do you?” She gnawed at some cheese. “I mean, you don’t need to take a ring off, ever! Certainly not for a bath.”

  Just then Faye came back in. She held out her left hand, brandishing the ring on her finger. “There. See? It was sitting just where I left it, in my room.”

  There was an uneasy silence but we got through it. Then, a few days later, the same thing happened. Lottie drew attention to the fact that the ring was missing again, Faye went off in search of it, and Sam and Lottie exchanged words. After the fourth time, even Lottie stopped commenting on it. Faye took off her ring during the day, when she was at work, and put it on again when she came home.

  It was therefore no real surprise when, two weeks after that, on a Friday night, she was picked up by a man, who was to take her dancing. He came up to the flat and introduced himself as Cyril, saying he worked in the same shop in the factory as Faye did.

  He was a strange man, this Cyril. He was nearer thirty than twenty and well on the way to being bald, with a thin, wispy mustache. When he spoke it was barely above a whisper, and when he walked it was more a quiet shuffle than walking proper. I can’t imagine what he was like as a dancing partner, but I took an instant dislike to him.

  He didn’t endear himself to me either when, on his first visit, he saw Will and said, “So this is little Fritz, is it?”

  “His name’s Will,” I said.

  “But he’s German, right? Or has a Kraut father.”

  I felt my jaw setting to one side. “His name’s still Will.”

  He looked at me, then shrugged his shoulders. “Have it your own way.”

  Fortunately, Sam was not present to witness this exchange, and I didn’t tell her.

  At breakfast the next morning, I asked Faye about Cyril. “He’s not in the army, right? Any reason?”

  Her mouth full of toast, she nodded. “Medical discharge. Trouble with his ears, getting over TB.”

  The ears explained his soft voice.

  “Is he a good dancer?” Lottie, I could see, was longing for a fight.

  “Better than Tony, that’s for sure.”

  Lo
ttie needed no more encouragement. “You might as well sell that ring, for all the time you wear it. Tony won’t like being two-timed—”

  Faye erupted—that was the only word for it. “You haven’t even been one-timed, have you, Lottie?” She slapped the table. “What’s it like on that shelf, Lottie? A good view of everyone else having fun, but lonely, I’ll bet.”

  Lottie blushed.

  “I’d hate being lonely,” hissed Faye.

  “Stop it, you two,” said Sam. She turned to Lottie. “You can’t blame Faye, not really. I know she’s engaged but… well, face facts: Tony could be killed at any time.”

  “There’s no need for you to stick up for me!” hissed Faye. “I can do my own defending, thank you very much.”

  Silence.

  “So how was the dance?” I said at length, to cut through the atmosphere.

  “Not much dancing, as it happened,” muttered Faye, grateful, I think, for the change of subject. “Some of the men started arguing about the war and in no time a fight had broken out.” She looked at me. “With the amount of blood spilled, your sister should have been there.”

  “What was the fight about?” I said. “I mean, was there something specific?”

  Faye drank some tea. “From what was said, it had something to do with gas. Someone said only the Germans would use it, that they were barbarians, and then someone else pointed out that we have used it, that it’s the poor people—the line soldiers on both sides—who get killed by it. That it’s not only the British who are victims in this war.” She spread more margarine on her toast. “That set everyone off—the idea that the Germans could be victims. I mean, people couldn’t stomach that. Cyril went for someone, and in no time there was mayhem.”