Things livened up a little on our second day in the country. The oafish boy who had pinched Geoffrey, who had pale eyebrows and an Old Testament name like Jonah or Noah, lay in wait for us when we turned down the lane towards the schoolhouse. The first we knew of him was when a sharp-edged rock hit Geoffrey in the back of the head. He yelped and crunched forward, clutching his neck. Then the fat boy was running by us, laughing, soft white flesh rolling at his midriff where his shirt was not properly tucked. I stuck out my foot without more than a second of forethought and he jammed hard against my leg, tripped, went straight down, head smacking into the muddy road, his considerable weight behind it. Unfortunately for him the road was grooved into hard, gravelled ridges by farm vehicles and as he sat up, forlornly surprised, we saw that blood was running from a cut in his forehead and that little stones had embedded themselves like huge freckles in his soft cheeks.
‘What happened?’ Geoffrey asked me as we watched the boy in the mud, the lane filling with children. ‘I didn’t touch him.’
‘I tripped him,’ I said quietly.
‘Hannah! You’re a holy terror!’ Benjamin exclaimed.
‘Shhh, Ben,’ Geoffrey whispered.
But it was too late. Here came Mr Bailey, getting up speed as he pushed his cane down into the track, vaulting himself along towards us, children parting to let him through. And Jonah/Noah was pointing a finger at me. ‘Her!’ he said. ‘That town girl done it!’
For the entirety of that day I sat at a little desk to the side of Mr Bailey, away from the other children, scarcely believing that this was regarded as punishment. I was on the side of his glass eye and I was at liberty all day—as he spoke to the class, marked exercise books at his desk, gazed sadly out to the fields—to observe the way it sat still in his face as around it muscles twitched minutely in his brow and jaw, and his other eye performed the subtle movements of real, living tissue.
At home time, though, Mrs Walton-Jones came for us. Some message had been transmitted and she gusted into the room as the bell sounded with a hand thrust forward to take hold of mine. ‘Thank you, Mr Bailey,’ she said loudly. ‘I’ll manage this from here.’
The boys gathered around her as she pulled me outside. In the yard children lingered, waiting to see what would happen. She leaned down towards my feet, as though she were about to do up my buckles for me, and slapped me on the calf. No such thing had ever happened to me before. It barely hurt, but I found the intimacy of it shocking. Take your hand OFF MY LEG, I wanted to shout. I caught myself, but only enough to ask, ‘What on earth are you doing?’ as she straightened to her full standing height. Once more we were providing a spectacle for the village children.
‘When my boys misbehaved, they were smacked. You are no different. And you must leave that boy alone. It’s not his fault, poor thing.’
‘But, Mrs Walton-Jones, he threw a stone at Geoffrey. It hit him right in the head!’
‘That boy fell flat on his face!’ Benjamin said, at her back. ‘Whack!’ He clapped his hands together. Geoffrey was regarding me sheepishly from under his thick black curls.
She took my hand and Benjamin’s, Geoffrey following close behind me, and led us across the yard to the gate, our audience scattering before her heavy stride. ‘He’s not right, you know. None of them are, those Shipmans.’ She dropped her voice. ‘Difficult births. Brain damage. She should have stopped at the first.’
I might have stepped into a Victorian novel. I forgave her the smacked leg instantly for this bit of Gothic gossip. She seemed entirely to have forgotten my disgrace, justice having been served. No one threw any more stones at the boys’ heads, either.
I woke one morning having dreamed of the changing of the guard and smelled charred meat. My stomach flipped with hunger. I dressed quickly and tumbled down the stairs to the kitchen. There was only Mr Walton-Jones there, reading yesterday’s paper with a pot of tea and a mug in front of him on the table. I hovered in the doorway, thinking I would retreat until Mrs Walton-Jones was up, but he had lowered his paper and was looking at me with a slightly puzzled expression on his face.
‘Good morning—Hannah?’
‘Good morning, Mr Walton-Jones. What is that smell? I thought something was cooking.’
‘Ah, bit nasty. I’m afraid there’s been a fire at the aerodrome. Bomber came in with its tail alight and went down amid the horses. Pilot and several horses perished.’
‘You mean, that smell is horses . . . cooking?’ And a pilot, I thought, but did not say. I was testing the value of my very occasional capacity to leave a thought unsaid.
‘Not to put too fine a point on it.’ He picked up the paper again.
At school, there was silence as we sat down at our desks, but Tessa Donald, a girl whom I had easily vanquished as top of the school in every subject and who loathed me with an intensity I found natural and even comforting, put her hand up immediately after register. ‘Oh, Mr Bailey.’ He turned his sad gaze upon the girl. ‘Father says the injured horses are to be shot this morning.’
I waited with relish for him to set the barbarous little horror straight, but his expression did not change. It rarely did. It was just variations on rueful.
‘Yes, of course,’ he sighed. ‘They must be put out of their misery. It would have been seen to immediately but Mr Emery must be fetched from the fields so he can bring his rifle.’
Benjamin burst into tears across the room. I knew it was him; he snivelled rather a lot when crying, and if he continued he would get the hiccoughs, but I did not turn around. I was waiting to see if there was something else, something I had missed.
‘Now, Benjamin. There is no other way. There is no rest home for horses, you know.’
A picture formed in my mind instantly of this thing he had conjured, a rest home for horses, lying in their beds, heads on the pillows, cups of tea on trays in front of them, more of them sitting in easy chairs in a library, hoofs holding books in their laps. What does this man know of rest homes? I wondered. What injuries has he seen? What can happen to a man’s body and yet leave him alive? I saw figures on beds with cannon holes where their insides should be, half their heads missing, no one with hands.
Then I remembered what would happen to the remaining horses and clenched my pencil tightly. I said nothing. We were famed for our ignorance of practical matters as it was. And even Mr Bailey was siding with them. You might have thought he would show a little sympathy.
The schoolroom was quiet but for the murmuring of Mr Bailey’s voice over a pupil’s shoulder every now and again and a fly buzzing near the window, dashing itself against the glass, Mr Bailey too distracted to notice and set it free. When the shots came—crack, crack, crack—my pencil stilled on the page, and we all looked up at him. He was gazing out the window, and though he flinched at the sound, he was lost in some spell that did not break.
Soon the lunch bell sounded and we left our sandwiches in our satchels hanging on the hooks by the door, streaming out into the lane. I do not recall any sign coming for us to move en masse like this. Way up on the road between the hedgerows, villagers were passing in the direction of the aerodrome. Perhaps it was their movement that drew us into the stream. As we reached the house Mrs Walton-Jones was emerging from her rose garden onto the street and fell into step beside us, wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Awful, awful business. Eleanor’s absolutely distraught. They didn’t want the aerodrome next to their field in the first place. Puts the frighteners on the poor horses every time one comes in a bit low. But you do your bit, I suppose. They’ve lost half in one hit. Not to mention the shock of that poor boy being dragged out of a burning plane in front of the kitchen window.’ I saw the Guy from the old days, in Regent’s Park, its black shape in the flames.
We drew level with the aerodrome and there was a half-destroyed plane out on the tarmac, men all around it contemplating it gravely, the blackened mid-section and wings and the jagged metal edge where the tail should be. The head of the pro
cession turned down a right of way between the aerodrome field, fenced off with barbed wire, and the horse pasture. We came to a gap in the hedge, a kissing gate, and the horses piled up in the middle of the field. As we climbed over the fence and gathered around the heap the smell of those that had been burned was acrid and there were black, dusty legs and heads, singed-off manes. Others looked perfect, their skins glossy, their muscles curved and smooth. The village, perhaps fifty people with us children, gathered in a circle. One horse had half of its face missing and beneath it there were muscles all twisted together like an anatomy diagram. I looked about for Mr Bailey, but it seemed he had not come.
Perhaps it wouldn’t happen now, this gathering towards such an event. Parents would shield the eyes of their children, keep them indoors. But the war had come home to England, and it would have been unthinkable not to go and see what it looked like. No one was frightened, not even the little ones. I saw all the curves of flank and thigh and jaw and could not tell what belonged to which horse. Benjamin’s hand slid into mine. The people gazed quietly for a few minutes as more gathered behind us. Flies buzzed. A murmuring rose from the crowd. ‘Took Tom twenty years to build up. Gone in a day.’ The children whispered to each other about the eyes. Some were missing. Some looked right at you. No one mentioned the burnt pilot or asked at what point he had died.
The smell was a bit much after a while and we all began to drift home and back to school. We passed a man carrying a petrol can going in the opposite direction. In the lane I could again smell the flowers and the grass, and there were birds, bumblebees. Geoffrey and I walked quietly amid the villagers, Benjamin between us, holding our hands.
Emil
MUNICH, 1918
The men’s bodies were a horror. They were all the same: thin, bluish, striped with prominent ribs, fading away in their long rows into the shadows. Above them swung kerosene lamps from massive low-hung meat hooks; their delousing shed had once been a slaughterhouse. There were at least fifty men in here, naked, waiting for the orderlies to come along with their great flour sack of powder on a squealing cart, heavy shovel dragging along the stone flags. Emil heard the squeak of the wheel behind him and covered his eyes and mouth, heard the whump of the powder as it hit his head and shoulders, coated his chest and legs. He trudged along behind a crowd of men, his skin alive with sensation: the juddering cold of the old warehouse in November, the heat of the powder, found his scratchy towel and parcel of clothes piled up against the wall.
Here was Müller, dusting himself down, pulling on his shirt. He turned at the sound of Emil’s voice and spread his arms out, smiling. ‘How do I look?’ His civilian clothes were too small for him, the buttons leaving gaps at his chest, the grimy cuffs flapping at his forearms. His trousers skimmed the top of his socks. The peak of his cap was frayed. He always was a slightly odd-looking man, thin as a flagpole with a fleshless head, skeletal, the big eyes of enduring hunger. Laughed frequently though. Filthy mouth.
Emil reached for the string on the nearest parcel, cold fingers fumbling to untie it. ‘You look ready for the maids of Munich, friend.’
‘Aha! Let’s hope they’re ready for me! And you, Becker. You look thirsty. I know you saw that beer hall we passed on the way into town.’
‘Perhaps we should be getting the men onto trains. Some of them are homesick.’ But he was smiling. He had felt an electricity in the streets. Shouting, and banners. Groups of men loitered on corners, nodding as the soldiers moved through. And the news of Ludwig’s flight, the King of Bavaria driven out by revolutionaries. There was a feeling abroad; he wanted to mingle with it, merge with the streaming crowds, go with them, be carried forward into a new future that eliminated the past.
‘None of them are homesick enough to abandon us after we have brought them back to Germany, safe and sound. They owe us a drink or two. Their mamas can have them back tomorrow.’
They had known the border was close when they came upon a queue of a few hundred men, dishevelled and separated from their units, some looking like they had been hiding in the mountains for who knew how much of the war. That was not his business. His squad, the dregs of other squads, had been thrown off the train to demobilise and he simply needed to get them onto another one, preferably on the German side of the border. Emil and Müller led their thirteen men towards a group with horses standing around a fire with black smoke, eating, passing around a bottle of rum. ‘What is this?’ he said to Müller. Müller shrugged. The men did not answer.
The next hill was a German hill. Beyond it a German town—Munich, he hoped. Someone, somewhere would give him brown clothes or blue or black, and he would light a fire and throw in his grey uniform, say a few words for the families of lice who had travelled home with him. Home in time for Christmas.
He began running past the stagnant stream of soldiers on foot, some leaning on horses, fires lit against the evening cold, playing cards, throwing medals by their ribbons into the pool of cigarettes and notes that would buy nothing in Germany. Müller was at his shoulder, he heard him laugh breathlessly. They were running without fear of being shot, like boys.
The crowd thickened outside two long military tents that lined the road. Four officials sat at tables outside, checking papers by torchlight. The men waiting protested loudly; pushed, jostled. Emil squeezed into a gap at the table with the sparsest crowd. ‘Is it just you men here processing our papers?’
The man looked up, gave a hopeful nod, seeking sympathy.
‘Just you, for all these men?’
‘Just us. We were not expecting so many to arrive without having been properly discharged.’
Emil stepped out of the crowd towards Müller.
‘There don’t seem to be many of them,’ Müller said.
‘I know. It’s madness.’ He jogged over to the first group of soldiers. They looked up, eager for news. ‘Come through!’ He waved towards the tents. ‘Move on!’ There were two trucks amid the few hundred men. They grumbled to life, too many men clambering aboard, whooping and whistling. The driver sounded his horn to scatter the men in front. They pressed against the tents as the procession started down the road. Emil ran to a group of horsemen. ‘Come on. Keep moving. Everyone through before nightfall. Stay on the road to Munich. We will all arrive together. On, on. They can’t shoot us all.’
They dressed in the delousing hut, clean, cold, reduced to their habitual condition of fidgeting and shuffling to keep warm.
‘You’re right,’ Emil said. ‘They can buy us beer tonight. With luck we can avoid sleep altogether.’
‘You’re not impressed by our quarters?’
Emil laughed. Next to the delousing hall, in the old cattle pen, where animals once queued to have their throats cut, perhaps a hundred palliasses had been laid on the stone floor. You could see your breath in that room, although it might be better when filled with sleeping men. As Müller had said when they downed their packs and hidden their weapons under the mattresses, it was colder than a trench puddle in there.
They had all been drinking with dedication for an hour, packed into a social club, a cramped room hot with bodies, ten tables squeezed in, bread on plates, heavy beer in tall mugs, brewed in the cellar, everything put on free for the soldiers. The proprietor stood behind a short bar at the back wearing a waxed apron as though he were tanning hides, filling their glasses at a tap. ‘God bless you,’ he said to each of them as he handed them back their glasses, filled but lacking in froth. ‘Welcome home to Germany. We are indebted.’ The stuff he served was flat, sad puddles of white on its muddy surface, but it hit you fast. Already there was singing, and arguing about the workers’ councils, and the surly Schumacher, silent in a corner, as though they’d all been at this for much longer.
Emil raised his glass and attempted to drink his beer down, but finished only a third of it before feeling his gorge rise. He sat watching the movement of the room, the shifting colours, clumsy, thick-headed, glad to relinquish his usual state of sabre-edged alertness
for this lazy blur. On the walk home across the slippery frosted cobbles he would be sick, probably, and in the morning he would remember nothing, and he would ride the trains across Germany to Duisburg, and that would be the end of that, if he had any sense.
Except here was Schumacher. Agitated. And so Emil must sharpen up again, watch for trouble. Schumacher sat down too hard in the seat opposite. Its feet scraped a few centimetres across the floor before he steadied himself, leaned on the table until it stilled. ‘Let’s go to Berlin!’ he shouted.
‘But you are from Frankfurt,’ Müller said jovially, with an edge of warning that Emil heard afterwards like an echo.
‘We’ve missed the action here.’ He thrust a finger in Müller’s face, tipping his head towards Emil. ‘He knows what I mean. Someone just told me they’re planning more demonstrations. That’s the place to be. I want a say in who runs this country.’ His voice snagged on the last few words.
‘No one can stop you going wherever you choose,’ Emil said quietly.
‘Those bastards in Berlin! We need to get up there and set them straight.’ Schumacher lifted his glass, spilling a little on the table before standing, staggering away towards the bar.
Müller studied Emil. ‘You’re not thinking of going, Becker?’
‘Not with him, no.’
‘You’re an officer. There will be rewards for us, in spite of everything, if we are clever. We can be anything we choose now. You don’t want to risk that.’ Always the glint in his eye, as though he was joking.
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