The Very White of Love

by S C Worrall

  ‘Why is that?’ Martin takes a sip of wine.

  ‘Two words.’ Gibbens lifts a forkful of venison from his plate. ‘Garlic and red wine.’

  ‘That’s four.’ Martin grins at his friends, raises his glass.

  ‘My final call—’ Gibbens swallows ‘—was a woman in the advanced stages of labour.’ He shakes his head. ‘The husband had gone to fetch the doctor. But apparently he, the doctor, didn’t fancy the weather.’ He laughs. ‘So he sent the poor man packing.’ Gibbens raises his glass. ‘So, at 8.23 a.m., I delivered my first French baby.’ He clinks glasses with Martin and Saunders. ‘The father says they are going to name it Trevor.’

  ‘The people here are incredibly friendly, for the most part.’ Martin butters another slice of baguette. ‘It reminds me of the valleys in South Wales. Desperately poor. Hearts of gold.’

  Gibbens pours himself another glass of wine. ‘When this war is over, I hope that we will have a general medical service for the nation, accessible to all, regardless of income.’

  ‘A National Health Service?’ Saunders looks shocked. ‘Isn’t that socialism?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Gibbens tips back his glass, licks his lips. ‘Health is a universal right. Not a privilege for the well-off.’

  The centre of the village that is now Martin’s home is the Grande Place, a small, muddy square at the top of a gently sloping hill. Ranged around it are the cardinal points on the compass of any French village: a church, a bar tabac, the mairie, and a boulangerie. But now the square is filled with military vehicles and equipment; the convent has been turned into Gibben’s Regimental Aid Post; the village hall and the école des garçons are being used as billets, the rest of the men are distributed in farms and houses in other parts of the village. The officers are billeted in a chateau in the centre of Wahagnies. ‘Chateau’ is too grand a word. The building on Rue Pasteur where they have established battalion HQ is more a grandiose chalet: three storeys high, built of re brick, with a portico of Doric columns at the front and a small park at the rear. It is owned by a wealthy industrial family, the Lallarts, from the nearby town of Carvin. But they only use it as a summer house. So, when Martin and the rest of the officers arrived, it was as cold as the tomb. Frozen pipes. Damp walls. Mildewed mattresses. They spent the first week lighting fires, laying carpets, blocking up draughts.

  ‘Mister Preston!’ Captain QM Pallett, the quartermaster, calls to him from the back of a lorry being unloaded in front of the storerooms. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

  Pallett, known to everyone in the battalion as Patsy, or Q, for quartermaster, is a veteran of the First World War: a barrel-shaped man with a ramrod stance and piercing eyes, who was fighting on the Western Front in the last war before Martin was even in his nappies. A painter and decorator by trade, at forty-three, he is also one of the oldest men in the battalion and, as quartermaster, the man responsible for feeding and victualling the battalion. The fact that Q knows his name fills Martin with pride.

  ‘There’s a load of coal waiting at the yard in Carvin.’ Patsy slides a box of salt across the floor of the lorry. ‘Can you fetch it?’ He lifts another box and dumps it on the pile. ‘The CO says he can still see his breath indoors.’

  ‘Yes, Q!’ Martin replies. ‘At the double.’

  Carvin is a rail junction on the fringes of Lille. As Martin and his platoon arrive in the Panopticon the sun is already setting. The pink light on the dirty snow mixes with the glow of the steel furnaces. The coal yard is at the end of a long, potholed track behind the station. After lowering the Panopticon’s tailgate, Cripps makes a ramp for the wheelbarrows out of planks.

  A north wind digs its fangs into their flesh. Martin wraps his scarf around his head, grabs a shovel and sinks it with a metallic clang into a snow-covered mound of coal. It takes five minutes to fill the barrow. When the barrow is full, Cripps wheels it up the ramp and dumps it in the back of the lorry.

  In half an hour the sun disappears. The temperature drops. It’s now well below zero. Except for the yellow glow of the track lights, they work in the dark, filling barrows, wheeling them up the ramp, filling more barrows. Back-breaking, dirty work.

  ‘Take a break, sir, why don’t you?’ Cripps says. ‘There’s tea in the cab. We’ll finish the rest.’

  Martin clambers into the cab, unscrews the top of the Thermos flask and pours some tea into a tin cup. He nurses the cup in his hands, the metal warm against his skin, then swallows a mouthful and lights a cigarette. Behind the partition he can hear the sound of the wheelbarrows being emptied. As the coal spills over the metal floor it sounds like the sea breaking on a pebble beach.

  He wipes his blackened hands on a damp cloth and turns his requisitions book upside down to write on, searches for his pen. But he’s forgotten it. Scrabbles around in the glove compartment, looking for something to write with and eventually finds the chewed stub of a pencil. He is dying to write to Nancy. He just received a long letter from her, full of news, and bits of poetry, and love. But he owes his sister, Roseen, a letter. Everyone at Whichert House will want to know he has arrived safely.

  He blows on his hands, takes another sip of tea and scribbles the address and date in the top right-hand corner: Feb 1st – written in a lorry in ‘squalid’ Flanders. 1st Bucks Bn. B. E. F.

  Dearest Sis,

  Although the fog of war has not grown very thick, I have been rushing around in a kind of haze ever since we arrived in France. I’ve become general dogsbody to the battalion. I either fly round in a truck fetching or commanding things. Or I interpret and give ignorant advice about adding comforts and improvements to the billets.

  I am living above the officers mess. I share a huge double bed with Trevor Gibbens, the doctor, and there’s another friend in a camp bed there too: David Stebbings, the Intelligence Officer. I have one drawer in a chest of drawers and a third of a washstand. The good Mme Dupont has given us sheets, which is a great luxury; a lavabo, some carpets, a tiny table. Opposite is a brasserie from where the beer and red wine for our mess comes at 4f 10 cents the bottle en gros. It’s perfectly good and goes down well. In the Army it is forbidden to drink water that has not been boiled or chlorinated. I had a bath in a tin contraption last night and felt very clean afterwards. That’s my second proper bath since Southampton!

  It was wonderful to see you and Nancy, though I kicked myself afterwards for being such a wreck. I could have killed the company commander, who kept me sitting in a lorry for an hour and a half on Sunday, waiting for some rations that should have been loaded at nine o’clock. I would have loved to have given you both one last hug.

  This place is squalid – no other word for it. The people are friendly and the troops well behaved but there’s nothing attractive and no one pretty to be seen. Just slag heaps and canals. And mud.

  At least the weather is improving. A thaw has set in and we no longer go round being really hurt by the cold. You’ve been getting it, too, I think. Up to now, the ground has been too hard for fieldwork and the trucks and lorries have had to be watched and cared for every second. But we are now digging, like moles, and practising our roles in case of a German invasion. We’ve heard one air raid warning but no gunfire yet.

  The door of the cab opens. ‘Here’s the paperwork, sir.’ Cripps hands him a coal-smeared receipt. Martin reads over it, signs it with the pencil, hands it back, then blows on his hands again.

  I have just heard from Nancy. She says that she has had a letter from me. When you see her, give her a big kiss from me and tell her that I miss her more than she could imagine. And take one for yourself, too. Don’t worry about me. Martin.

  21 FEBRUARY 1940

  Wahagnies

  It’s almost a month since the battalion arrived in this remote, mining village in the steel and coal country of the department of Nord-Pas-De-Calais. The weeks have dragged by in a blur of tedious duties and tasks: trench digging, running messages, sorting out problems with the men’s billets, and endless ‘orders group
s’, an Army term for meetings where previous actions are reviewed and coming actions are planned. The trouble is: here in Wahagnies, there is no action. Only waiting – and the mind-numbing repetition of make-work tasks. Martin has lost count of how many times he has taught his men how to dig a field latrine.

  Yet despite the boredom and the mud on his clothes, Martin takes pride in his work. Like everything, the techniques of warfare have their own grammar and vocabulary. Building a pillbox or laying a neat roll of barbed wire are new skills he is learning. When they arrived in France, he and his men were civilians dressed up in uniform. Now, they are becoming soldiers. His forearms have thickened out, his shoulders have become broader, his chest has bulked out, his thighs have grown stouter from all the marching. He feels like a man. Not a boy.

  This bleak Wednesday morning finds him steering his Norton motorbike carefully over the slippery cobblestones. He’s been ordered to go and investigate a complaint that has been lodged by one of the local farmers who is billeting troops. Freezing fog hangs low over the tiled roofs. Piles of dirty snow line the sides of the road. His hands and feet are so cold they ache. He tries to imagine Nancy here, but he can’t. It’s just too alien, too ugly. That feeling, that they are now living in separate realities, only makes him miss her more keenly; and cherish the bundles of her letters he has brought with him even more.

  Every day he runs to the postmaster to look for a letter. If there isn’t one, he spends the day moping about, like a sick puppy. When he gets one, as he did the day before yesterday, he tears the envelope open and consumes it in one gulp, like swallowing back a glass of the best brandy. Up in his room at night, he takes it out again and rereads it, his mind immediately filled with images of their life together, and of England.

  England? That’s now represented by a scruffy little shed halfway down the hill from the square with a knot of squaddies standing queuing outside it. An enterprising local housewife opened it as a café as soon as the battalion arrived, and is now doing a roaring trade serving such masterpieces of British culinary art as bangers and mash and faggots and peas, served with frites doused in vinegar and wrapped in greasy copies of Le Quotidien, the local newspaper. She has even hung a Union Jack above the door and learned a few English words, like ‘ducky’, ‘you cheeky bugger’ and, most confusingly, ‘rumpy pumpy’.

  At the bottom of the hill, Martin brakes sharply as the houses taper off into a snow-covered meadow bordered with aspens. A herd of mud-stained bullocks stand up to their knees in muck, munching on a bale of hay. In the distance, a steep-sided hill pokes up from the flat land, like a white pyramid rising out of the desert.

  When Martin had first seen it, on the way up from Le Havre, he had thought it was a mountain, though the sides seemed too regular, like one of the isosceles triangles he drew in geometry class as a boy. And this part of France is one of the flattest in the country, anyway. Only as they drew closer did he realize what it was: a vast, snow-covered slag heap almost five hundred feet high, like the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

  He steers the Norton under a crooked archway into the cobbled courtyard of a rambling, brick farmhouse surrounded by dilapidated barns. A cock crows from the top of a dung heap. A mangy black and white cat peers out from under a broken cart. Martin crosses the courtyard, goes up a short flight of stone steps and knocks at a green-painted door.

  ‘Monsieur Hugot?’ The door is opened by a tiny, white-haired man bundled up in a pair of dark green overalls and several layers of hand-knitted sweaters. His cornflower-blue eyes flick nervously back and forth. Martin extends his hand. ‘Lieutenant Preston.’

  ‘Vous parlez francais?’ The man looks Martin up and down.

  ‘Je me débrouille.’ Martin shakes his hand. ‘I get by.’

  The farmer turns and leads the way up another flight of steps into the kitchen. Rows of onions hang drying from the rafters. Along the back wall, a tall, glass-fronted cupboard is piled with crockery. A canary hops about in a cage. ‘Ma femme. My wife.’

  The farmer points to an elderly woman perched on a stool covered in a fleece next to the stove. Like the man, she is tiny, with a wind-scrubbed face framed by a shock of white hair. Her hands are red and swollen, as though she is wearing a pair of inflated, rubber gloves.

  Martin extends his hand. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Madame.’

  The woman doesn’t react.

  ‘You have to talk louder,’ says the farmer. ‘She’s deaf as a post.’

  Martin nods, then says to the man: ‘So, what’s the trouble?’

  The man’s voice is like a door creaking on a rusty hinge. He also speaks in the local patois, so Martin has a hard time understanding what he is saying. But the gist of it is: last night, a group of Bucks men returned drunk from the estaminet on Rue Jaures. The rest of the men were asleep in the haylofts. But instead of going to sleep, this group of drunken hooligans broke into the private side of the house and chopped up the best piece of furniture in the house to make a fire: a wardrobe given to the farmer’s mother on her wedding day.

  ‘Ils sont comme des animaux, vos soldats!’ The farmer is quivering with rage. ‘Your soldiers are like animals!’

  ‘Please, allow me to apologize on behalf of Her Majesty’s armed forces . . . ’ Martin looks contritely at the old man. ‘And I can assure you that this won’t happen again.’

  ‘Apologies are no use!’ The farmer’s hands start to shake, his jaw trembles. ‘What about the wardrobe?’

  Martin sucks in his cheeks. ‘Would you be kind enough to show me?’

  The farmer opens a door at the back of the kitchen and leads him up a rickety, wooden staircase. ‘Up there is where the men sleep.’ The farmer points up the next flight of stairs to a hayloft.

  Martin gets up on tiptoe and peers inside. The windows are blacked out, so it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust: hundreds of bedding rolls and mess tins are arranged in rows across the straw-covered planks. Laundry hangs from the ceiling. On the wall, someone has scratched a sentence: ‘Sapper S.Williams. Sapper N. Lundy. 101 Army Field Coy. B.E.F. The Lads Who Fear Fuck All’.

  Martin turns back to the farmer. ‘How many men have you got staying here?’

  ‘One hundred and fifty.’ The farmer clears his throat and spits.

  Martin whistles in surprise. ‘A hundred and fifty? In here?’

  ‘Half here, the rest up there.’ The farmer points up another rickety staircase to the eaves. He turns and points down a passage marked ‘Privé’. ‘This is our side.’ He indicates a broken lock. ‘They smashed this to get inside.’

  Martin follows him into a large, almost empty room. It’s so cold that it takes Martin’s breath away. The farmer goes to the shutters and opens them. A few bars of watery light filter inside. ‘Voilà!’ The farmer points to the remains of a wardrobe in the corner of the room. The doors have been ripped off, the sides smashed with an axe, only the base and the legs are still standing. The farmer spits. ‘Animaux!’

  Martin shakes his head. ‘That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.’ Martin picks up a broken piece of wood. ‘Mahogany?’

  ‘Oak! From the Second Empire!’ The farmer spits again. ‘My grandfather made it!’ He squeaks. ‘Il faut des Dommages de Guerre!’

  Dommages de Guerre. War damages. It’s the first phrase the French liaison officer taught Martin when he arrived in Wahagnies and he has heard it almost every day since, mostly fraudulently. A cow drops dead. Dommages de Guerre! A dovecote is blown over in the wind. Dommages de Guerre! A horse is stolen. Dommages de Guerre! A farmer gets drunk and knocks over a cupboard full of china. Dommages de Guerre!

  This one looks genuine, though. ‘How much did you pay for the wardrobe, Monsieur?’ Martin asks.

  ‘I didn’t pay anything!’ The old man glowers at him. ‘I told you: my grandfather made it!’

  Martin sucks in his cheeks, considers. ‘All I can give you is 2,000 francs, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Two thousand francs?!’ the farmer spits again. ‘That
’s daylight robbery! It’s worth at least a hundred thousand!’

  Martin smiles, diplomatically. The power is all in his hands. Ultimately, he doesn’t have to give the farmer anything. He takes out an invoice book, writes the date, then a brief description of the incident, signs the form then hands the old man the top copy. ‘Take this to Monsieur Levy, the liaison officer. He will process the claim.’

  ‘The Jew?’ The farmer clears his throat.

  ‘He is Jewish, I think, yes.’ Martin gives the farmer a piercing stare. ‘More importantly, he’s a scrupulously honest man, and a very good bloke.’

  The old man kicks a piece of splintered wood. ‘The Jews always nickel and dime us.’ He turns and points at the door. ‘The lock will need fixing, too.’

  In the evening, Martin heads to the mess to work. A pile of letters from the men has been dumped on a table in the corner for him. In the opposite corner, Hugh is playing chess with the adjutant. Martin can hardly keep awake. But the mail is going out first thing in the morning, and it’s his turn to act as censor. It’s a job he hates: akin to spying, even though he rarely finds anything that could bring even the slightest comfort to the enemy. All references to dates or locations, any reference to military equipment or contingency plans, troop movements or numbers, have to be blacked out with a special felt pen issued to him by the battalion postmaster.

  Only a few hundred miles separates him from Nancy. But it could be a thousand. Between them is an insurmountable wall of bureaucracy. Postmasters and censors; mail trains and ships; accidents and delays. They live in different tenses. His past is her present. The present she describes arrives in his future. By the time he learns of something new in her life, it is already old news.

  What remains is imagination. He pictures her cycling through the lanes to Church Path Wood or sitting at the lighted window of the train as she travels home through the blacked-out streets of London after work. When he looks at his watch, he thinks of what she is doing at that moment. If it’s seven in the morning, she is making a pot of tea and getting ready to go to work. At one o’clock, she is walking in Hyde Park during her lunch break; or window shopping at Selfridges. In the evening, when he is having dinner in the officers’ mess, all he has to do is close his eyes for a moment and he can see her kneeling on the floor of her room at Blythe Cottage, listening to Brahms. Or is it Fats Waller tonight?