The Love of a Lifetime

by Mary Fitzgerald

  We were all frightened and any man who says he wasn’t, is a liar, or mad. Nobody admitted it at the time of course, banter was the order of the day, banter, filthy jokes and foul language. How else do men keep their courage up? Not the Bible, I can tell you. Even the Padre, who was part of our company, kept his religion to himself, even turning away, pretending to adjust his pack whenever we had a prisoner to dispatch. God was on our side, you see. The Japs were heathens.

  Seeing Japs burst out of the jungle in front of us, yelling and screaming, firing wildly, with their little officers waving swords and the sun glinting off their glasses, was a sight that made my guts turn to water. It took all my training and nerve to stay calm and keep my finger on the trigger of my Lee Enfield.

  “Wait!” I would hiss to my squad, “and keep your fucking heads down.”

  I wonder if I could have been so steady if I had been just an ordinary squaddy. Being in charge makes you think more clearly and having to care for young men who are so frightened, is a great boost towards behaving well. They liked me, I think, and trusted my judgement. Lewis’s cheerfulness and good sense in battle helped too. Before he was killed, I managed to get him his stripes back. He deserved them.

  That bastard, Captain Parker came with us on one mission. Why? Well I don’t think it was his idea, all his career he had stayed out of direct trouble, hiding in an office and criticising those who did the real soldiering. I couldn’t stomach him. Trying to play the ‘big I am’ when he barely knew what the hell he was doing. Jack Barnes, took him aside and gave him a mouthful, which we weren’t supposed to hear, but we did.

  “You’ll answer to a court martial for that, Lieutenant Barnes,” says Parker.

  “Do what you fucking like, when we get back to base, but here, keep your mouth shut. You haven’t a clue what’s going on and will get us all killed if you carry on.”

  We fell into an ambush on the last night of our patrol. Our objective was to cut the railway line between Rangoon and Mandalay and cause havoc to the Jap supply system. We’d done it and were on our way out when we came upon a nest of Japs. Walked straight into them, surprising them eating their supper. Normally we would have smelled them first before stumbling into their clearing, you always could. It was their food you could pick out above the smell of the jungle, but that night the monsoon rains were teeming down, deadening everything for miles around and we strolled into their camp.

  “Surrender,” screamed Parker, before anyone had moved.

  “Fuck that,” I lifted the Bren I’d been carrying that day, a useless weapon most of the time, and sprayed a round into the group sitting round the camp fire. The rest of the squad followed my lead and Jack Barnes threw a couple of grenades into the clearing but Parker ran around, hands up, begging the Jap to take him prisoner. To my alarm, more of them suddenly appeared out of the trees, firing like crazy and screaming like they always did.

  I’m not sure who killed Parker, but one of us did. He suddenly tipped over sideways, hands still in the air and lunatic eyes wide open. I know that I fired a volley of shots in his direction and out of the side of my eye, I saw Jack Barnes raise his pistol and carefully site a shot. But then, the Japs were after him too. Maybe they got him.

  After it was over, we looked down at him, the only one of us killed, though a couple of men had wounds and one died of his later in the hospital after we got back.

  “What about him?” asked Jack.

  “We’ll bury him here. Killed in action. Very honourable,” I said. I never looked at him in the eye and he the same. Nothing more was said but I was secretly so glad. All those years of snide remarks, ignorant comments and put downs. Captain Parker was one man who needed killing, in my book.

  Oh it makes me tired even thinking about those years of fighting. It wasn’t only the combat, it was the waiting. If I close my eyes, I’m in a little clearing, back against a tree, eyes peeled wide open for the slightest movement in the green dripping mass in front of me. And Lewis, beside me, sucking his teeth as he always did when all the world was still, and I can see the knuckles of his hand whitening as he gripped the barrel of his Lee Enfield.

  At night he would hum very softly, always the same tune, ‘Bobbie Shaftoe’ I learned that as a child and didn’t realise that it was a Geordie song until I heard him. Lewis didn’t even know the words, only the tune, over and over again. It didn’t matter how many times I told him to shut up, after a quick ‘sorry’ he would start up again

  “I been told that the little yellow bastards are probably deaf, man,” he would whisper and then grin at me with brown teeth.

  Bloody nuisance he was and I swear he once gave our position away with that damn song but nonetheless, I always felt safe when he was around. He would watch my back, see.

  It was hard staying awake sometimes, especially when you’d been tracking through the jungle all day and crossing rivers onto higher ground. My legs would be like jelly when we stopped and I was almost afraid to sit down for fear of never getting up. And then when I did, I could feel my eyes closing, sitting on the ground knowing that the forest around us and the rocks above could be swarming with the enemy, ready and eager to kill me.”

  This is Sharon again. Richard drifted off when I went into him so I changed the tape and brought it back here in the kitchen to listen to while I made supper. Jason came round to join us. I told him about Richard’s army service and how horrible he had made it sound.

  “I knew about that,” he said. “Everyone in the village does. He was in the thick of the action in the Far East until he was invalided out. I think he was what they called a Chindit, sort of Special Forces. They went behind enemy lines to blow up bridges and railways. You should see his medals. He pins them on for Poppy Day and my Dad says that they would outdo every man in the district. He won the Military Cross, amongst other things.”

  The medals are in the drawer of his desk. He got them out once to show Thomas, holding the double row out in his old shaking hand so that my little boy could take them.

  “When did you get this one, Mr Richard?” he asked, pointing to a medal with a red white and blue ribbon.

  Richard touched the metal cross. “I can’t remember,” he said and stared at the silver medal and ribbon as though it would tell him the story he had forgotten. “I can’t remember,” he said again and he looked so distressed that I took the medals out of Thomas’s hands and put them on the table.

  “Enough now, love,” I said, “it’s time for bed.”

  He went up and I stayed with Richard who was looking at the row of medals as though they were something he had never seen before.

  “This is the Military Cross,” he said, pointing to the one that Thomas had been waving about. “And do you know, I can’t remember what I did to get it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, “whatever you got it for, it means that you were a very brave man.”

  “Maybe,” he said, sitting back in his chair to stare again out of the window. He is getting vague now and almost far away.

  I came back to him this evening after nurse had finished and he was more awake.

  “I want to talk some more,” he said. “I have to get it recorded.”

  “O.K,” I said. “I’m all yours.”

  For some reason that tickled him and he started to laugh; so much that it brought on a bout of coughing and he had to have a few whiffs from the oxygen machine before he was ready to speak again.

  “I used to say that to Elizabeth, when she telephoned to ask me about a problem on the farm in Ireland. It was a joke between us, don’t you see? I was always ‘all hers’ in every way. She wasn’t the same. She didn’t want me as a permanent fixture after John was killed. “I can’t be hurt again,” she’d say. “You could be killed too.” But I didn’t give up.

  “That’s what I spent the money on, the money that Billy had given me and the extra that I’d saved. I bought her a farm in west of Ireland. It was nothing much when we took it, a hundred acres or so,
which sounds a lot but land was dirt cheap then and that particular lot wasn’t best grazing. Later on she added to it, bit by bit. She was a good businesswoman and I helped her with money, so by the end she had bought up the whole estate. Estate, ha! Six farms that brought in a few quid and a big grey stone house set in five acres of overgrown parkland that needed all of that few quid and more, spending on it. It must have been wonderful once, but the last owner lived in it like a pig. Fair play, the old boy was well into his nineties when he passed on and had been taken for a ride by all his tenants, save Elizabeth.

  “‘My God,’ I said when I went over in the sixties and she had moved into the big house, ‘you’re quite the lady of the manor, all this parkland and a lake, for Christ’s sake.’

  “All she did was laugh. ‘Nice, isn’t it, or at least, it will be,’ she said and rang the bell for the maid to bring us tea.

  “From the drawing room, you could see across the park to the village church and the cemetery where my son was buried. As I stood looking out on the view Elizabeth brought me a cup of tea and lingered beside me.

  “‘We’re altogether, now,’ she said. ‘That’s what I always wanted’.”

  That night in her grand bedroom, she asked me to leave home and come and live with her in Ireland.

  “‘D’you mean that? Do you mean marriage?’ I was flabbergasted. For all those long years after John died, she had kept me at arm’s length, welcoming my regular visits, but never wanting our old closeness to be resurrected. We’d been together often, I went to see her four or five times a year and we were as loving as ever. There was never a problem about our loving each other; that side of us never faded, but she wouldn’t make the commitment and I had to be grateful for the part of our lives that we did have. It wasn’t so bad, you know, not many people are lucky enough to have a love affair that lasts for nearly forty years.

  I lay on that huge four poster bed beside her and gazed at the Chinese patterned wallpaper that she had left on the walls. It was torn in places and faded in others but most of it was fine. It was lovely, turquoise blue, with peacocks and pagodas and little bridges perched over running streams. You could stare at it for ever.

  “‘You want to marry me after all this time?’ I said again, turning to face her and uncertain that I had heard her correctly.

  “‘Yes, I do.’

  “Oh, what a facer. I had wanted this for all of my adult life and now she was finally offering us the chance to live out the rest of our lives together. My Elizabeth, still beautiful at sixty with her white hair and brilliant blue eyes. She turned heads even then, when we went for a meal or now and then to races, which I had grown to enjoy. My family had never gone racing. It was a bit too rich for our plain Protestant blood but when I was with her in Ireland, all that nonsense was put aside. A day on a muddy race-course, with a roll of notes in one mackintosh pocket and a flask of whisky in the other and I was a happy man. It didn’t matter that I was getting on in years. I was grizzled now, my red hair so peppered with grey that I looked like an old dog fox, who would be better off put out of his misery. But Elizabeth still liked me, still thought I was smart and linked my arm when we were out, as though she was proud to be seen with me.

  “‘Will you, Richard?’ She sat up in bed and pushed her hair out of her eyes. She was wearing a white cotton nightdress with a lace pattern on the front. It looked too big for her and I noticed how thin her wrists were as they poked through the frilled cuffs. ‘Will you marry me and come to live here with me?’

  “Do you know what I did then? I burst into tears just like that stupid lad I’d been all those many years ago when I couldn’t have the thing I wanted. Now I had it and it was almost too much.

  “She held me, soothing my face and whispering most loving words in my ear until I had got over my tears and was able to kiss her and whisper my reply.

  “‘Yes, Elizabeth. Of course I’ll marry you and gladly.’

  “That night I didn’t sleep, but lay awake thinking about practicalities. I would have to sell Manor Farm and give up all my other bits of business. In the years after the war I did quite well in business, first in the contracting business then building and finally buying a garage and selling motor cars. It was being on my own that made it possible. Men with families don’t have the time but after Mother died, I was completely alone at the farm. In the daytime, of course, there were men about, one of the old farm workers from Billy’s time who had come home safe from the war and Ernie, who would stay with me until the day he died. I had another two men as well. I needed them because I was spending more and more time away in business and on my frequent trips to Ireland.

  “I made money, a lot really, but apart from presents for Elizabeth and a succession of newer and bigger cars, I spent very little. The house was nicely furnished and well maintained and I would take myself off for a holiday in the mountains every year. Because of my war injuries, climbing was no longer possible, but I could walk and I’ve explored the lower slopes of many of the great mountain ranges. I even went back to the Northwest Frontier one springtime.

  “That market place in Peshawar hadn’t changed one jot since my last posting there in the thirties and as I walked through the busy dusty streets, breathing in the cold clean air scented with spice from the roadside cook-shops, I could almost believe that I’d never been away. But it was different, when you took a longer look. The British army had gone and although a few Europeans had stayed on, they were strangers now in a land in which they had no standing and little respect. I felt sorry for them and glad for the Pakistanis at the same time.

  “Oh, I’m wandering again and there’s so little time to tell you the whole story. Give me drink of that tea and I’ll carry on. No, don’t fuss girl, I’m all right. Put that microphone closer to my mouth.”

  “I came home a couple of days later, to set in motion the sale of Manor Farm.

  “What the hell has got into you?” said Fred Darlington when I went to tell him about putting the house and land on the market. He was retired from the police now but still living in the village, in one of the new houses.

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve always wanted to be with her and this is my chance.”

  “But you can’t sell the farm. The Wildes have been there all this century.” He snorted. “You know what will happen. Another housing estate will go up.”

  I thought that was rich coming from him, living in the estate that had laid waste to the beautiful grounds of Cleeton Hall. “You’re a fine one to talk,” I growled, “and anyway, the place will have to be sold sometime. I’ve no-one to carry on.”

  That was the truth. I had no-one and I did so want to spend my last years with Elizabeth, so I went ahead with my plans.

  I bought a diamond and sapphire engagement ring and a gold and diamond watch for her and put them in the top drawer of my dressing table. Every night while I was waiting for the sale to go through, I would telephone her and we would plan what we were going to do with the money. Doing up that ruin of a house was the priority and then improving the land. Drainage was necessary and clearing the scrub. Oh I had great plans. And all the time I would look at the ring and the watch and imagine her face when I gave them to her. Did I remember the watch that Johnny Lowe had given her and was trying after all these many years to match it? I don’t know. I expect somewhere deep in my heart I was, but I didn’t recognise my foolishness. When had I ever? All I knew was that I was happy. Happier than I had been for years with so much to look forward to.

  One night when I phoned, she sounded strange. “What’s up?” I said, nervous.

  “Nothing, really, I’ve just got a bit of indigestion. Stop fussing.”

  After that we carried on with our conversation as normal, but I could hear that she was breathless every now and then and I went to bed worried. I couldn’t sleep and several times nearly picked up the telephone and dialled her number. But I never did. I knew that I would be doing it more for my peace of mind than hers.

&nbs
p; The next morning I was tired and bad-tempered with the men when they came to work, shouting that the farm might be for sale, but it still had to be worked properly.

  “OK, boss,” said one of the youngsters, “keep your hair on.”

  That remark sent me into such a rage that I sacked him on the spot and turned to others offering to do the same for them. Sensibly, they kept their heads down and for the rest of the day, only Ernie, who hadn’t the brains to stay quiet, spoke to me.

  “Two of the calves is scouring, master,” he said. “Will you drench them?”

  I was ready to go for him, boiling up again because something had gone wrong and my control of events was slipping away. I could feel my fist curling up and if he’d said another word, I’d have hit him and enjoyed the satisfaction of taking out my frustration on him. But then I saw the fear in his face and sickeningly remembered that that was how he often looked in Billy’s time. That brought me to my senses and I calmed down.

  I went inside and telephoned the airport. There was a flight from Liverpool to Dublin that evening and I could hire a car and be with her before ten. That was the best thing to do and before the men went, I organised them to cover the farm.

  A doctor was at the great house when I got there, his hat and overcoat lying across a chair in the bare and echoing hall.

  “’Tis the doctor,” said the little maid, “the mistress has taken a turn,” and she showed me up to Elizabeth’s room.

  My heart was pounding as we climbed the stairs. How would I find her? What did ‘taken a turn’ mean? Was it only a silly little faint or something worse and if worse, why hadn’t she told me? I was frightened and angry at the same time. It was so typical of her, always getting me in a state of confusion. I was ready to have a row with her and entered her room with a scowl on my face.