The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘You mother was English? Whereabouts is she from?’

  ‘Near Oxford. She wants me to go visit, see if the house is still there.’

  ‘You must go, it would mean such a lot to her. And it’s part of your past, after all. You’d be sad if—’ she seemed about to say one thing and then to change her mind ‘—it would be such a pity if you missed the chance.’

  He knew exactly what she’d been about to say, and was glad that she hadn’t.

  And then there was the long shadow of Mr Ransom – or Sergeant Edward Ransom of the REME as Spencer now knew he was – to fall across his friendship with the family, and like a black admonishing finger over his passion for Rosie. Until one day in early September something happened to change everything.

  Autumn was on its way. The Americans at Church Norton, already crabby at the prospect of another Christmas away from home, were being pushed beyond endurance, and as well as losses in the air there had been two fatal accidents, on both occasions pilots crashing before takeoff. A big old yew tree whose gloomy black branches had hung over the churchyard for centuries was felled by the second of these, its enormous bulk flattening gravestones and leaving the stubby church tower looking bare and vulnerable.

  Blue Flight lost Eammon Ford, and the mystery of his little black book was revealed. It might have stayed secret had not Si been first on the scene from Blue Flight when Ford’s locker was opened, and offered to send on his personal effects. He knew better than to broadcast the book’s contents, but Spencer found him reading it that night in the hut, turning the pages as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  ‘Should you be doing that?’

  ‘Guy’s dead, Spence, what does he care?’

  Frank looked up and said gently: ‘That’s not the point. He didn’t want anyone to see. Just send the stuff back where it belongs.’

  Si raised an eyebrow, gave the two of them a sidelong grin. ‘You wanna know what’s in here?’

  Frank shook his head, but Si took Spencer’s silence as a ‘yes’ and read out loud from the first page.

  ‘ “A book of prayers for my children, Molly and—” He’s left a space there. First one goes, “Dear Lord, teach me to see you in everything, even the things I do not like. Let me always try to see the other person’s point of view. Teach me to hate wrongdoing, but not wrongdoers. Show me how to forgive others, and myself. Let me never be smug . . .” Can you believe this guy – hey, what are you doing?’

  Frank had come over and taken the book out of his hands. ‘Enough. It’s private.’ His voice was kind of sad and regretful, as though he himself were a father talking to a child who’d let him down. He closed the book and held it up, like an official in court. ‘Will you send this stuff home, or shall I?’

  ‘Take it easy, Frank, I’ll do it – I’ll do it!’

  Spencer thought that judging from the little he’d heard, Eammon Ford was nearer the mark than the padre at Church Norton. Two weeks later a letter arrived for Eammon informing him of the birth of his son, Amos John, weighing in at seven and a half pounds and the dead spit of his father.

  It was raining when a few days after that Spencer cycled over to Craft Cottages. The airfield road was slippery with mud, and there were blackberries on the hedge. It was evening, and with the cloud cover and the nights drawing in it was dark by the time he got there. Janet answered the door with her finger to her lips.

  ‘The children are asleep.’

  ‘Is Rosie in?’

  ‘No, she’s at the pictures and staying with her friend afterwards.’

  She wore a dark blue dress, buttoned up to the neck, not a smart dress but oddly formal-looking as if she were going out somewhere. He’d brought a bottle of bourbon with him, but something about the dress made him shy. And Rosie’s absence on this dark evening left a gap he didn’t know how to fill.

  ‘I brought this along.’

  ‘Thank you, that’s kind.’ She took the bottle. ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘Only if you would.’

  ‘Oh, I’m going to.’

  He sat down on the wooden armchair opposite the couch, but when she came back with the drinks she didn’t sit, but took a couple of mouthfuls of hers before saying: ‘We got some news today.’

  ‘Yeah? Not bad, I hope?’

  ‘My husband’s dead.’

  Shocked, Spencer put down his glass and stood up. ‘Lord, Janet, I’m so sorry. What happened?’

  She still held her glass in front of her, in both hands. ‘He caught a cold and got bronchitis. It turned into pneumonia. He always got chesty with colds, and I suppose the conditions . . . He wasn’t so young, either. Poor Eddie.’

  Her voice was low and sad, but steady. He was glad that she didn’t seem about to cry.

  ‘Would you like me to go?’

  ‘No. It’s nice to have you here, Spencer.’

  ‘Do the children know? And Rosie?’

  ‘Yes.’ And Rosie, he thought, had gone to the movies. Janet’s glass was empty. ‘Would you like another of those?’

  She smiled briefly. ‘Thanks. It’s in the kitchen.’

  He went through and poured her a generous shot. When he returned she was standing there, head bowed in concentration, unbuttoning the front of her dress delicately with her long, pale fingers.

  Spencer caught his breath. He couldn’t move, was spellbound. When the buttons were all undone she looked up at him. Her face was set and still but her eyes pleaded.

  ‘Spencer . . .?’ She held out her hand to him, her right to his left as she did with Ellen. Slowly he put down the glass, stepped forward, and laid his hand in hers. She drew him towards her and slipped his hand between the open buttons of her dress, looking down as she did so in a way that turned his stomach to water. He felt cool, slippery material, warm skin, the hard tip of her breast.

  ‘Please . . .’ she breathed. Her eyes closed as her lips parted and softened. ‘Oh, please . . .’

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘Hast thou given the horse his strength?

  Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?

  . . . the glory of his nostrils is terrible.

  He paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength:

  He goeth on to meet the armed men’

  —The Book of Job

  Harry 1854

  Before it had been horses thrown into the sea. This time it was men.

  Cholera followed them on to the transports at Varna and was their fellow traveller as they sailed south to join the fleet at Balchik Bay. Even had infection not been with them to begin with it would soon have taken hold, because the transports were so crowded that it was impossible on many of them even to sit or turn round. Thirteen hundred men were packed on to one ancient man o’ war where no provision for such numbers had been made beyond the removal of the guns. Lack of space dictated that everything except men was dispensable. Piles of clothing, tents, arms and equipment were left. Over five thousand horses – officers’ mounts and pack animals painstakingly rounded up in Scutari and Varna – were herded into a hastily built depot and abandoned to what Harry knew must be certain starvation, or a quicker but even more painful fate at the hands of the Turks. He could almost find it in his heart to be glad that Piper had escaped. Better to think of him galloping until his heart burst in the heat, than rotting to death in what was to all intents and purposes a prison camp.

  Emmeline Roebridge was smuggled on board somehow, under cover of the general chaos and confusion, and against the strongly expressed wishes of the divisional commander, Lord Lucan. But no contingency plans had been made to accommodate the hundreds of soldiers’ wives expressly forbidden to continue with the army to the Crimea. The wretched women formed a hysterical mob on the dock, and in the end there was nothing for it but to load them, too, on to the already-overcrowded transports, at the expense of yet more supplies.

  Across the unstable makeshift lighters trooped the women, and those horses allocated space, while on the quay the hap
hazard stacks of summarily unloaded equipment grew, even including medicine chests and ambulance wagons, to the delight of the locals. Not twenty yards behind him, in a cabin where at least one brother officer lay dying behind a rigged-up screen, Fyefield and the rest popped champagne corks and flirted with Emmeline, congratulating themselves on having got her on board. Harry, not wanting to appear prudish but unable to join in the merriment, went out on deck. From the scummy sea water around the transports there protruded bobbing corpses, jettisoned hours before but returned, as they rotted, to the surface, tenacious of their old element, their yellow-green faces puffed up by putrefaction in a mockery of rude health.

  The process of embarkation seemed interminable, the confusion and noise beyond anything Harry could have imagined. The smoky air was full of the rattle of drums and the strident blast of conflicting regimental bands, designed to raise spirits but resulting only in a discordant row. The horses, underfed, overtired and agitated by the din, were fretful and hard to manage. But however justifiable their nervousness, to the sailors they were just one more bulky cargo to be loaded, and an inconvenient and contrary one at that. The men had no experience in handling them, and precious little regard for their feelings. Ears, tails, and even flailing legs were grabbed without ceremony, sometimes by more than one burly, cursing seaman, and blows meted out without fear or favour. Betts was enraged by this behaviour and in spite of his fear of water went down amongst the sailors to remonstrate with them, but he was hopelessly outnumbered.

  Due perhaps to Piper’s disappearance, Harry was not obliged to leave Clemmie behind, but when he went down to her in the hold it wrenched his heart to see the way her legs were splayed and her head hung as if still dangling in the loading sling, in an attitude no longer of trust but of dull, cowed lassitude. It may have been fanciful, but in spite of Betts’s oft-repeated ‘We’ll see ’er right, sir’, Harry no longer felt that when he laid his hand on the mare she took comfort from it: rather that it was seen as a sign of impending treachery. Yet Clemmie was fortunate in being in the first consignment of horses to be embarked, for not long afterwards a swell got up, making the rickety lighters heave and toss, panicking the animals and sending many of them, with the men leading them, into the water, their yelling and thrashing dreadful to witness, as the impassive dead looked on, riding the waves.

  As they pulled out of the harbour, the officer whose last hours had been spent listening to the clink of glasses and the tinkle of Emmeline’s laughter, was slung overboard, wrapped in a horse blanket.

  To Harry all this seemed so far removed from his long-nurtured ideal of heroic warfare, that even had he been able to do it justice in a letter he could not have sent it, nor expected those at home to believe what he’d written. Except, perhaps, for Rachel, whose face was becoming more clear to him as it became more distant.

  The short voyage south was almost dead calm. Even the least observant and imaginative infantryman could not fail to notice that there was no life to be seen – not a bird, nor a fish, scarcely a cloud that wasn’t caused by their own smoke. It was as if death’s presence on the voyage created a territory around them which no living thing was prepared to enter.

  At Balchik Bay it was no better. The stately grandeur of the mountains encircled a scene every bit as harrowing as the one they’d just left. Cholera had also ravaged the fleet here and bodies bobbed like corks among the ships. Through the night, as the vessels rode at anchor waiting for all the transports to arrive, beneath the babel of men and animals the ears of all of them became attuned to the intermittent soft splash of the dead going into the deep.

  Even when they sailed on, the tall masts and funnels and the great columns of steam more like a factory afloat than a fleet of ships, it was still not for the Crimea, but north once again to rendezvous with the French at the mouth of the Danube.

  Finally, on the afternoon of 11 Sepember the combined fleets set sail eastward across the Black Sea, their leaders having finally decided that they should make landfall near Eupatoria, at a place named Calamita Bay.

  Harry read his parents’ letters first, setting Rachel’s aside to be savoured. His mother had written the letters, although his father had added his signature, somewhat unsteadily, to the end of them. Maria’s writing was like her, full of real feeling naturally expressed, but staccato and disjointed, flitting capriciously from subject to subject using half-sentences linked by dashes, or simply running into one another. Harry was poignantly reminded of the last letter he had received from Hugo, on honeymoon in Italy, how its appearance had conveyed his elation as much as the contents.

  She was well, reported Maria, and his father was trying to eat more, but failing to get any stronger in spite of everyone’s best efforts. She had been trying to cheer him up by having some amusing little parties at which there had been music and singing and one or two parlour games: ‘the funniest, funniest thing imaginable when a person must act some everyday activity “in the manner of the word” – I had to play croquet “passionately”! And then Mrs Carmichael to do “riding a bicycle” in the same way – I am afraid she was comical unintentionally as well – I thought I should weep from laughing!’

  In picturing this gathering, though he knew how well his mother meant, Harry could only feel sorry for his father, sitting baffled and below par as the merriment unfolded. But Maria went on to say that Rachel had also been present, ‘and was a marvel, surprisingly (!) full of fun but not much inclined in her condition to caper about like the rest of us so she sat beside your father and quite took him out of himself for a while, even making him laugh from time to time, though whether at our antics or her comments, who knows?’ Harry could see this scene, too, in his mind’s eye and it made him smile. Maria said that she had also discovered, from Mr Carmichael, that it was possible to have letters delivered by Queen’s Messenger from Horseguards, and this she intended to organise if possible, because she had little or no faith in the postal service in a theatre of war. It appeared that this scheme had been effective, because her second letter, though dated six weeks after the first, had apparently arrived within three weeks of it.

  It made worrying reading.

  ‘I cannot pretend,’ she wrote, ‘that there is any smallest sign of improvement, so when you consider that he has been like this for so many months, what is there to say but that he is worse? It is not possible for a man – who has been so strong and vital as you know – to be like this for ever, it is not a life –’ she had underlined these words fiercely ‘– and if he were a horse or a dog I should put him out of his misery. And so, Harry, would you, out of common kindness and love – I cannot bear it and do not know what to do – the doctor is kind but useless, it is not his fault ...’ Here she went on to deliver a colourful litany of the kind doctor’s manifold shortcomings, ending with, ‘The trouble is that he and I both know there is nothing to be done, but he will not say so from pride in his profession, and I will not because I will not, because I cannot bear to ...’

  All this brought tears to Harry’s eyes. Surrounded daily as he was by the horrible consequences of mass official neglect and disorganisation – disease and privation on a scale he could never have imagined possible six months ago – he realised that he was becoming habituated to the horrors. But the thought of his father quietly burning out at home in England in spite of every care and attention, however ‘useless’, made him sick with unhappiness.

  He turned to Rachel’s letter last. Its tone, as he might have expected, was as different as possible from his mother’s: measured, thoughtful but – he was certain he did not imagine this – full of a real concern not just for his welfare but for his thoughts and feelings, both about the war and his father.

  I am sure your mother will have told you that your father is very ill, and of course she becomes so angry and despairing. She is a person who likes to do, and there is nothing to be done. I believe he is far more philosophical than her, and it is wonderful to see the way he does his best to seem cheerful, to p
lease her, so that she will not fret too much. They are so very different, and yet theirs is a marriage of minds and hearts such as most people only dream of, but which I know Hugo and I might have had. Dear Harry, I think often of the happy and loving childhood enjoyed by you and Hugo, and that it must have been that, in part, which gave him his own gift for life. I hope you don’t think me presumptuous for writing in this way about the family that you know and love and from whom you are presently separated. I do so only to express my own feelings for them, and perhaps to bring them in some small way closer to you.

  I wonder whether your mother has described to you the jolly soirées held, as she would have it, to divert your father – all sorts of unlikely locals were pressed into service and did valiantly all things considered. Not that they had much choice. Maria as you know is not a woman with whom to take issue, even over charades! I think the evenings may have been as much to divert her, which is no more than she deserves, but seeing her laughing and carefree did make Percy smile, and he and I sat together like Derby and Joan and exchanged some very wicked and, dare I say, witty observations on the other guests and the proceedings generally.

  And now, dear Harry, I wonder how it is with you? I read the reports in the newspapers but they only describe the movements of ships and men, and not the sights that you see, the sounds you hear, the smells, the experiences, the excitements and discomforts. Even the horrors, if there already are horrors. When next you write, try to tell me something of all this, because I wish to try to be there with you in spirit. That, I think, is what letters are for, don’t you agree? Not simply for the listing of events, though I am hungry for those too, but for thoughts and impressions, so that it is more like having a conversation, seeing not just what the other person sees, but how he sees it.