The Love of a Lifetime

by Mary Fitzgerald

  The Colonel came in one morning after his usual ride and stopped by my desk. I’d been made a Lance Corporal by now, which was somewhat quick but I’d proved useful and I think that was it.

  “Morning, Wilde,” he said. The Colonel was a good man. He knew us all by name and remembered incidents in which we’d been involved, even when some of us had long forgotten them.

  I stood up smartly. “Good morning, sir,” I said.

  “Now, lad, you should be happy today.”

  “Why’s that, sir?”

  “Don’t you know?” He gazed around the room, surprised and the other clerks standing beside their desks, looked as mystified as I did. He frowned. “I thought Parker would have told you by now. Oh well,” he slapped his riding crop against his boots and grinned. “Orders have come. We’re transferring to Meerut.”

  I must have looked puzzled for he added with a great laugh, “India, Wilde. India. That’s what you wanted wasn’t it, when you joined? You’ll love it.”

  Oh, and I did. I was truly excited about seeing the country that my uncle had described so lovingly and when we embarked on the troop ship at Liverpool I couldn’t stop myself from grinning.

  “Good God, Wilde,” said Lewis, “you look like the fucking cat that’s got the cream.” He had a rough tongue and taught me a few choice words, I’m ashamed to say but I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “I have,” I said, stowing my gear and testing the wafer thin bunk that was to be my bed for the next few weeks. My feet hung over the end if I stretched out and I couldn’t do that for another bunk met mine and another soldier wanted to lie down.

  We were billeted in cabins that were probably below the water line, certainly we didn’t have a porthole and for that I was quite glad. My pals were high spirited and no end of belongings might have gone missing through that window, if it had been there. Our equipment was stored in cabins on another deck, so those men who hadn’t taken out their hot weather gear in time, had to go begging to the officer for permission to wade through the duffel bags.

  The journey took a month, stopping in Gibraltar for a few days where some men disembarked and others came on board and then on through the Mediterranean towards the Suez Canal. Luckily we were on deck for most of the day and everyone’s mood lightened as we sailed further south. It seemed that as the grey winter skies of Great Britain gave way to a brilliant blue, then the spats of bad temper that affected confined men gave way to cheerful banter and good humour.

  The sights I saw amazed me. A cheer went up when we saw our first camel. The animal was led by a man dressed in a long striped robe, who walked as casually as our Billy would have when leading one of the horses across a field. The Arab gave us a wave as our ship slowly passed by. We saw another man and another camel then more and soon the sight became commonplace so the lads didn’t bother to cheer and settled back to the card game that had been going on non-stop since we’d left Liverpool. I was fascinated though. Did these people think like us, I wondered. Did they laugh and cry and do the things that we did? It didn’t seem possible. I could only see them as figures who had dressed up in foreign outfits to entertain us.

  I’d bought a book about India before we left and read it avidly, picking little sections with romantic or dramatic stories to read out to my mates. They listened agreeably enough, but not many of them were as enchanted with it as I was. So I read my book and leant over the ship’s rail watching Arab dhows sail by and sniffing the changing smell in the air. You see, it’s true, you can smell a country before coming to it and I could smell India, spicy and enticing for days before we reached port and our huge boat docked amid the cranes and busy wharves of Bombay.

  Right from the moment we marched down the gangplank loaded down with equipment and still unsteady from four weeks at sea, I loved India. It was all that I had hoped for, exotic and different. Strange in so many ways, yet just as my uncle had described it to me. And where was I based? In the very same garrison as he was and within the first week I had found his grave in the military cemetery and established that most important link.

  I wrote once to Mother, to tell her where I was, it seemed a right thing to do, and mentioned that I had seen the grave. We had corresponded since I’d joined up but not much. A line to tell her when I joined up and where I was and a couple of Christmas greetings. She had written back several letters but I was disinclined to reply. Me, who spent hours writing letters for my pals, telling their families fantastic stories of their abstinence and success, barely bothered to contact my own family. Mother had written of Billy and Elizabeth’s nuptials, which took place only months after I had left.

  ‘They were married on Christmas Eve,’ she wrote. ‘It was a raw day, but Elizabeth looked very well in ivory silk and they went that afternoon for a few days to Ludlow. The hotel is open all year.’ I closed my eyes, imagining Elizabeth in the ivory silk gown and wondered if she had worn my necklace. I doubted she had.

  In the few other letters I learnt that Granny had died, the farm was doing well and that the shire horse colt had won a prize. ‘He’s the spit of old Diamond,’ wrote Mother, ‘it’s a grand line.’

  So when I wrote to tell them that I was in India, it was with some triumph. I might have been rejected and thought of as only the second best at home, but I had achieved something that I knew that none of them would ever do. I’d travelled, seen sights that would amaze them and lived among people who were not of my colour of religion.

  Meerut was not far from Delhi and it had been a garrison town for nearly two hundred years. It teemed with life and was noisy and dirty with people vying for space on the dusty roads with bullock carts and bicycles. Open air shops lined the main street and I was amused to see not only shopping being done but dentistry and medical procedures performed in full view of the passing crowds.

  We lived in barracks again, but, airy, open-ended buildings, with great bladed fans that drove in welcome drafts of air. Now even us, the lowest of the low in the army, had servants. Someone to do our washing and cleaning and for a few rupees you could get almost any service you wanted. Even girls.

  I was not surprised that my uncle had found himself a foreign wife; many of those Indian ladies were pretty. Sometimes, I would find myself, when off duty and walking through the market place, watching them, as they went about their business. They were like dainty birds in their multi-coloured saris and gold jewellery, chattering, bargaining and flashing their kohl-lined eyes. I was as fascinated by them as I was about everything in India.

  To my huge relief, when we joined the company, I found that I was no longer required in the offices. They were over-staffed with old timers who had been given an easy billet due to illness. Malaria was a problem, but we had our quinine tablets, which if you remembered to take, kept you in good health. There were other things too. Cholera and dengue fever, but on the whole that wasn’t as much a problem as the malaria. I was lucky. For most of my time in India, I suffered nothing more serious than sunburn. Later on though, during the war, I did get ill, but that was because of the diet and the conditions. I had an ulcer on my leg that took an age to heal and I bear the scar of that today. I’ve other scars, but they were the result of battle.

  No, once in India, I was back on the front line of my platoon and kept ready for action. The trouble was that none occurred. A few minor wars had cropped up in the last years, on The Afghan border and in a place I’d never heard of: Wazirastan. Only three years before I went to India, some small battles had taken place in this little princedom, but now all was quiet. But we were expected to be ready for action at any time and kept busy with exercises and trials of weaponry. We had some policing to do now and then, but I found it unpleasant work. It always seemed wrong to me, although I hadn’t yet understood the politics of what we were doing. I loved this country almost as much as I loved my own and I hated to see the locals put down. My pals laughed at me, saying I was soft on the wogs and they may have been right, but I didn’t think so then, and am proud of my
feelings now.

  But, having no fighting to do, we had to find some other occupations and that took the form of various entertainments. The boxing matches were popular but although I was big, the thought of fighting never appealed to me. Oh, I watched the bouts with pleasure, that’s true, but no matter how much the lads tried to persuade me, I would never put myself forward. I used to think about our Billy when I saw the team from our regiment sparring. He could have made two of any of them and won a few cups as well.

  And then there were the dances. We had lots of them and no shortage of young ladies to dance with, for plenty of Europeans were in and about the area and they had their families with them. These dances were held in the Recreation Hall, a vast bleak room that echoed when empty and needed at least a hundred people inside to instil a party atmosphere. Like most of the buildings in the camp, the Rec. was built up on pillars and you had to climb steps to entrance door. I suppose that was the best method of building out there, but two hundred feet doing the Charleston or a Highland Reel made a tremendous racket. It had a wooden floor, which was continually being eaten by termites so always in danger of giving way.

  The second year I was in Meerut I met a girl at one of those dances. We joined up as partners after doing two clattering rounds of the Paul Jones and stayed together for the rest of the evening. Her name was Alice and I can see her now, slight, with hair almost the same colour as mine but with hazel eyes where mine were blue. Her father worked for a chemical company and had been sent out to India when Alice and her little sister were still schoolgirls and had left them and their mother behind. It was a funny business, I thought, clearing off and leaving your family, like that, but I suppose the money was good and a lot of men couldn’t find work in the twenties. The mother died when Alice was fifteen, so she and the little girl came out to join their father and experience a new and exciting life.

  “Gawd! You could a knocked me down wiv a feather, when I first came here and saw all this,” she said, as we drank a lemonade shandy in between the foxtrot and the valeta. She had been brought up in London, and said ‘Gawd’ and ‘Blimey,’ as a beginning to nearly every sentence she spoke.

  “I thought, blimey, what am I goin’ to do wiv meself, all day. It’s a bit bloody different from the Old Smoke, innit?”

  I laughed. “Yes it is. A lot bloody different.” I was quite taken with her sense of fun and liveliness. The few other European girls I’d met in India were different from Alice: on their guard, ever watchful for a loss of dignity at the hands of a soldier and very keen on catching a suitable husband. Most of them were hopeful for an officer, but the social lines were equally well-drawn out there, as they were at home and the girls who got invited to the dances in the Rec rarely had the opportunity for dinner in the Officers’ Mess.

  Unfortunately for me, Alice was one of those lucky girls, for after a torrid six-month courtship she left me for an Irish doctor in the RAMC. He didn’t mind her Cockney accent and seeing her about the place off and on in the following years, it seemed that nobody else did, either. She was always in the centre of a group of officers and their wives, regaling the company with one of her funny stories and keeping them in fits. Fair play though, she wasn’t a snob. She’d always stop for a chat, if we met, clutching at my arm and being as friendly and comfortable as if we were still together. She stayed on in India during the war, when her husband was away with his regiment. I last saw her when I was in hospital recovering from my injuries. She was working as a nursing auxiliary and swooped on me with a squeal of delight and recognition.

  “You poor old bugger,” she said. “I could kill those fucking Japs,” and she looked at my quizzical face, realising what she’d said and laughed and cheered me up, no end. She had six children by then, Catholics, you see, but the red hair was as bright as it had been when she’d been a nineteen year old and had lain with me in under the mosquito netting of her bed when her father was at work.

  After Alice left me, I got interested in the concert party, although I was never one of the performers. They roped me in as someone who could organise the little tours they went on, the venues and the concert dates. I liked it because it gave me chance to do a bit of travelling, not far away but enough distance so that every month or so, we went to a different camp and stayed over. In that way, sitting in the cab of a ten-ton lorry, with the back loaded with our props, I got to see more of the country.

  On one occasion we went to Agra and I saw the Taj Mahal. I cannot express how exquisitely beautiful it was, especially as we saw it first thing in the morning in the cool part of the day. The early yellow light perfectly outlined the marble and showed up the intricate carvings to their best. We were told by an old European who was wandering around, that the Rajah had built it as a memorial for his dead wife, to show how much he loved and missed her. To me this was a noble gesture and it played on my mind as we drove away.

  “Would you do something like that?” I asked Lewis.

  “Bloody, no,” he said. “There isn’t a woman alive worth that sort of thing.”

  I said nothing, but thought about Elizabeth and how much I’d loved her. I was in my middle twenties now and hadn’t seen her for five or six years, for the time had passed by almost without my realising it. She probably had a child or even two by now, taking up all her spare time. She would have become settled and matronly. Whatever else, I knew that she would have long forgotten about me. That brought a new thought. Was my name ever mentioned on the farm? Did they get out the old photos and point me out to the children and say, “that’s your uncle Richard,” or something like that. And did the people in the village ask how I was getting on; the vicar, perhaps, or Johnny Lowe and the lads I’d grown up with. I wondered about the family, all those silly girl cousins and the outrageous Mary Phoenix. Had she turned up from her disappearance and settled into a respectable marriage or run away to live in sin? I hadn’t thought about the village for years and now it was nagging at my brain like an unresolved toothache. I wanted to go home.

  “You’re quiet,” said Lewis. He sat beside me in the cab, chain smoking and drumming his hand against the open window frame.

  “Mm,” I muttered but didn’t say more. Even after all these years of friendship I still hadn’t spoken about Elizabeth to him. I think he knew that I’d been disappointed in love, but it was never mentioned. In the army, we respected privacy. It was the only way for men to live who were in each other’s pockets most of the time.

  “D’you think we’ll get leave soon?” I said.

  “Maybe. We’ve been out here a while.” He turned his head to look at me. “You keen for home, now? I thought you finished with them, years ago.”

  I shrugged. “I have. I was just thinking, that’s all.”

  As it turned out, we were recalled to England the following year, but I didn’t go. I was made up to Sergeant and offered a transfer into one of the companies who patrolled the Northwest Frontier. This was exciting work and I would have been a fool to turn it down. It was to be my first experience of real soldiering and however much I longed to see the family at Manor Farm, they had to take second place to my career.

  Chapter 13

  They’re home! Silly old fool that I am, I cried when I saw the taxi coming up the drive and watched Thomas jump out of the front passenger seat and wrap his small arms around Phoebe, that daft dog who has been waiting for him each day. And I’m no better. Every morning, I’ve looked at the calendar and mentally counted off the days.

  She knew I would be watching and as she stepped out of the vehicle, she looked over to the window and inclined her head to me in that strangely formal manner that has forced its way through her abysmal upbringing. Andrew Jones said something to her then and she looked away to point out their cases, but I didn’t mind. I was already feeling better than I had for days.

  “Mr Richard!” It was Thomas’ high pitched yell echoing through the house and a wonderful sound it was after days of quiet footsteps and carefully closed doors.
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br />   “I’ve got you a present.” He burst into my room, followed by the dog and threw himself against my knees. I was winded for a moment, but didn’t let him see it. I wouldn’t put that child off, not for all the world.

  “Look!” he said and pushed a hastily wrapped parcel into my hands.

  “What is it?”

  “Open it, open it,” he said, wriggling with excitement.

  The tape was difficult to undo and with an old-fashioned ‘tut, tut,’ he snatched it away from my shaking hands and tore at the paper until the gift was exposed in all its glory. It was a bull and bullfighter, made of straw and garishly painted in bright reds and black. The bull had a silly grin on its face and the toreador a torn place on his trousers to show that he had already been thrown.

  “Why, Thomas,” I said with a laugh, “this is a wonderful gift. It will look well on my desk.”

  “I knew you’d like it,” he said and leaned his head against my arm in that familiar pose that I have grown to love. I bent and kissed the mop of red hair and the tears came to my eyes again. The memories of another are so strong.

  Sharon came in them and gave me a kiss. “How are you?” Her eyes searched mine and she touched my shoulder in a most affectionate way. “I’ve missed you,” she said. “There was so much to see and I wished you could have seen it too.”

  “Well, you must tell me about it all.” I said, hiding my watery eyes by looking down at the straw bullfighter. “I shall enjoy hearing about everything you did and what you saw.”

  Later that evening when Thomas had gone up to bed, Sharon came to sit with me in my room. I have not been sleeping well and am tired and restless. These days I can only manage catnaps and then I’m suddenly wide awake and frightened. Dr Clewes is reluctant to give me sleeping pills because, as he said, they don’t mix well with the heavy painkillers. “We might kill more than the pain,” he said in his sardonic voice and put his prescription pad away.