by S. C. Howe
‘Then don’t get killed.’
Tom studied Joss’s face, his eyes narrowing, but, even then, the complete collapse of Joss’s expression, of his anguish made him jump. Launching forward Tom held him tight, regardless of who might be watching, bent painfully over the bath chair as Joss cried agonisingly. It was then he felt himself break.
Tom spent most of the journey that evening in the dark, staring at his ghostly image in the carriage window of the train; his eyes were stinging, his hand moved to swipe away at his eyes to disguise that he had been crying. He had had to walk backwards away from Joss when he was called for – for the fourth time – from the house for his lift to the station. A maid had run towards Joss and wheeled him away, leaving Tom with the decreasing sound of anguish disappearing into the night.
Now his head throbbed and the future over in France loomed bleak, permanent and horrible.
Tom was put on light duties at Etaples, and then, as the weeks passed and the sun grew shockingly hot and the shadows pitched, he was moved up to stretcher-bearing and other orderly duties in the base hospital. It was there that he was called to the main office.
Roger Deerman got up from a wooden chair in front of the colonel’s desk.
‘Ah, there you are,’ he said smiling as if to an old friend. ‘I told the younger sib I’d look in on you.’
Tom saluted and stood staring forward, the way they had been trained.
‘Oh do stop the show,’ Deerman said, stubbing out a cigarette. ‘The last time we met I had my hands around your backside.’
Tom continued to stare ahead, expressionless.
‘Oh have it your way... How are you?’
‘Very well, thank you, Sir.’
‘Wounds all healed up?’
‘Just about.’
Deerman pulled a faintly exasperated face.
‘How’s John?’ The words came galloping out.
Deerman feigned to look surprised. ‘I would have thought you’d know better than anyone,’ he quipped, ‘considering the amount of time he spends writing to you... Oh, how do I know? I see the barrage of communications left out for collection whenever I grace them with my presence.’ They had indeed written by return.
‘How does he look?’ Tom asked.
Deerman considered. ‘Well, he’s moving around more now, although he’s having to walk on egg-shells because of his back. The arm is out of plaster and the foot under the cast has a good colour, but frankly he’s bored out of his mind.’
Without thinking, Tom sat on the chair alongside Deerman. He stared into space. Deerman coughed to bring his attention back.
‘How’s his walking? Moving around?’ Tom asked.
Deerman looked up with a tang of interest. ‘Getting around I suppose... If you’re missing the physical, I can oblige, you know. I have a rather nice little apartment in an officer’s block. We can have sex on tap all night.’
‘No thanks.’ The voice was firm.
Deerman fidgeted. ‘Oh, I thought perhaps his physical limitations meant you were–’
‘I’d crawl over no man’s land on my stomach for that man,’ Tom cut in, and for once Deerman did not reply.
They fell silent. Deerman broke the silence by scratching his head. ‘I see. Well, have a drink with me so I can tell old bro that you’re all right.’ Without waiting for his answer, Deerman poured two brandies. They drank.
‘John asked me to let you know that work’s started on the outbuilding at the farm. And he asked me to give you this,’ Deerman said, holding out a bundle of brown paper-wrapped books.
Tom took them and moved back. He had nothing to say to Deerman to tell Joss; Joss knew it by letter, but still, for the sake of how it appeared, said, ‘Thank you. And please thank Joss, and tell him another letter’s on its way.’
Deerman gave a small smile. ‘It’ll be the first thing he extracts from me.’
Tom saluted and walked back to his cold bed in the dormitory hut.
It was a dull, overcast day in August as Joss tried to walk around the garden, steadied by two sticks. No-one was around and he was glad because his gait was uneven, like a drunk’s. He had accompanied his father to Heathend Farm the previous day and had stood in the midst of the industry in the courtyard and felt his physical helplessness yawing in on him acutely. Oldish men, too old for conscription, were sawing new roofing battens for one of the barns. On the slopes of another roof, several men were perched on roofing ladders, nailing the orange-brown pottery tiles onto the battens. All activity, and it would mean nothing if anything happened to Tom. What use could he be to it? As it was, it looked as if he was going to have restricted movement from now on because of the badly out-of-line discs in his back. His foot was not healing particularly well either, encumbering him with an unusual gait, which everyone else had assumed was temporary. But that wouldn’t matter if he could only have Tom back. Nothing else mattered. Then it hit him that Tom could be wiped out at any minute and he didn’t even know where he was, other than somewhere in northern France. What would he do if he never saw him again? Joss’s good hand edged into his trouser pocket and found a small tin of opiate pills; he’d just have one. Just to smooth away the fear, pretend he needed it to dull the pain if anyone saw him.
Tom flinched as a shell shrieked overhead and, seconds later, the earth rocked and reverberated in his guts. He had forgotten just how demonically loud it was out here: the fierce cracks of rifle fire; the pounding of mortars; the staccato, inhuman noise of an answering machine gun. Fear sweated into his hair. There was the stink of cordite in the air with some more primitive odours: the iron-tang of blood, and of excrement. He pushed down his tin helmet and tried, resolutely, to walk on, not show any fear. Then a mortar crashed nearby, leaving him gasping and all he wanted to do was drop to his knees and hide. But that would be cowardice. They had to face the unfaceable, hide their flinching skin and pretend it wasn’t beyond endurance. ‘Cope. Just cope,’ he hissed to himself, digging his fingernails into his hands.
‘Well, if it ain’t Fielder!’ said the sergeant from his old company. ‘We thought you was dead, mate!’ he said in greeting and slapped him around the shoulders. ‘There ain’t many left from before you went, but the captain’s still ‘ere.’
Fielder was led down a narrow, stinking trench with its ramshackle fire step. How the hell had they lived in all this? he wondered, staring at the wan, hungry faces of men just out of an attack. How had he and Joss coped, let alone got to know each other? Descending steep steps, he came to an abrupt halt in front of Barratt who was staring at a map with another, painfully young second-lieutenant.
‘Oh Fielder,’ said Barratt. ‘I’m glad you’re back. How’s Deerman?’
Joss had allowed the tablet to take its effect whilst sitting down talking over plans of the farm with his father and the overseer of the work, a man his father had loaned from the estate farm. Now with the help of these two, Joss got to his feet, wavered a little, then followed on using the sticks, feeling the light-headedness of the opiates, dulling his pain, dulling everything in fact, so he felt he was gliding over the cobbled courtyard, which was smelling of pine wood from the sawdust. His father stayed back to help him.
‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’ he asked, his voice unusually concerned. ‘I can deal with this if you want one of the men to drive you back.’
Joss waved him away. In his forays over here, which he was troubled to think were very few, he had glimpsed the outer farm buildings, like a future treat to be enjoyed, so he gestured with his stick and wandered off. As he did so, a late sun and soot black shadows emerged, as though someone had just flicked on an enormous solar switch.
‘He all right, Sir?’ asked the foreman, peering after Joss.
‘I think he needs a call of nature,’ lied his father.
Through the blur, Joss could feel the calming strength of the sun. Pushing open a gate, he walked out through the thick meadow grass and down to a winding stream. Glints of sunlight glitte
red off the water as it rippled by. It would be fuller than this in the winter, he found himself thinking. Gurgling. He started laughing stupidly at the word. Wait until he told Tom! He hesitated. Told him what? He sat down on the side of the stream, above which damselflies jerked erratically: strange, unreal metallic blue and green things, darting unexpectedly, this way and that. He pulled his notepad out of his pocket to add a note for the letter he was writing to Tom that day, but the pen stopped on the paper and he stood staring at it, willing the words to get through the fog of his mind and out onto the page. It was like a mind-stutter, the words wouldn’t form into letters, as though they were nothing to do with him, as he had once felt briefly about his legs. There now seemed to be two layers of his mind – what he wanted to say, and what he could articulate or write. It was like playing tag with the opiates. Getting painfully to his feet, he went back, noticing the heavy, pungent scent of meadowsweet by the stream-side, and from the pastures above drifted the muzzy smell of someone else’s sheep. The westering sun was making the orange brick infills of the barn glow, as though illuminated. In the courtyard, he stared at the ventilation holes built in diamond shapes, tried to imagine the building full of sweet-scented hay, and a man – Tom or himself – working by lamplight that flooded the dark interior with copper light. It was timeless but of the present. Thinking of Tom, he caught his breath. His hand squeezed around the small tin of tablets deep in his pocket; he breathed more easily. Feeling light-headed and hot, as though with fever, he moved into the cool, stone, dairy building, which smelled of milk, butter and cheese, and which seemed to glisten in the dark. Could smells work their way into the fabric, he wondered. The coolness of the place seemed to come from the stone – the chill, grey stone he had seen as a child at Titterstone Clee – iron-like, which suggested granite and millennia. He noticed a long trough and flinched; it looked like a coffin. Joss shook his head, tried to banish the image, then looked at it again and realised it had to do with cheese-making or milk separation...or something. Frowning, he realised he actually knew very little about farming, of any of the farming trades, or stock or crops. He had left it all to Tom, who had stepped up to the plate, as Joss knew he would. A trickle of sweat wriggled down Joss’s back, his palms went sweaty; he couldn’t do this on his own. Even if had he wanted to, he couldn’t. He was, in all ways, dependent on Tom. If anything happened to him, he really was finished. At the moment he couldn’t even bend to put a sock or boot on, and his leg was aching from the short walk over the meadow and back. Some farmer he would be.
Mr Deerman found him, his head in his hands, sitting out of view of the others. Wordlessly he helped him up.
‘I think we need some dinner,’ the old man said at last, steadying his son. ‘We’ll stop by The Hereford Bull.’
Joss went to acquiesce but stammered very badly.
About an hour later, they sat in the lounge of the fine Georgian hotel along the main road back into Kidderminster. Mr Deerman looked at him with a serious frown puckering his rather jowly face. ‘Your Mother and I are worried about you, John,’ he said. ‘You don’t seem with us a great deal of the time.’
Joss took a deep, steadying breath, knew the words would come out properly this time. ‘It’s all the medicines I have to take; they make me feel muddled.’
Mr Deerman nodded. ‘Are you sure it’s just that?’
Joss looked at him in question, genuinely surprised.
‘You seem terribly flat.’
Would there be any use in saying, ‘Well, there is a war on, you know’, but decided against it; his father was trying to understand.
‘You don’t have a – um, gentleman’s complaint do you? There’s no shame if you do; there’s a good deal of temptation out–’
‘Oh, you mean the clap!’ Joss exclaimed. ‘No, don’t worry about that, no problem there!’ he said jovially. No, it’s just my heart breaking. Any minute my life could finish, but no, nothing wrong with my reproductive organs!’
Mr Deerman had the tact to look embarrassed. ‘You know you can always say if there’s anything...well, you know.’
Joss nodded too enthusiastically to put the old man out of his misery, then went to speak and stammered again.
‘You’re stammering again, John,’ said Mr Deerman. ‘You haven’t done that for a long time,’ he added as though Joss should be drawn to notice the fact.
‘I’m in a lot of pain all the time, but most of all I’m worried sick about Tom.’
‘There’s talk at the top that this war won’t be going on beyond this year.’
‘They’ve been saying that every year.’
Mr Deerman caught his arm, an unusual gesture for him, and looked directly at his son. ‘Take it from me, there’s talk.’
A few weeks later, they were in London. In a gesture that had made Joss love his old father deeply, arrangements had been made for Nico to be fetched out of quarantine at the kennels at Hackbridge, south of the river Thames. They had arrived the previous afternoon and that evening had walked from the hotel his father had booked and into the noise and dust. They crossed Westminster Bridge and watched the gas lighters lighting the lamps. The sunset had been an angry flame-red, like a warning; yet the fall of evening had a comforting feeling too, like the kindling of fires in grates, of dark autumnal evenings, kept at bay by domestic warmth and light. Standing on the wide berth of the bridge, Joss looked down into the muddied Thames. The reflection of gas lamps bobbed in the dirty water reminding him of the visual beauty of explosives and flares, before the sparks and fire died away. Like this river and the bold polluted sunset, reality had been momentarily tricked. Like the idea that out of their losses, out of the fire, would come the catharsis, but there had been no catharsis, just loss, and pain.
As they sat with a nightcap in the hotel later that evening, Mr Deerman suggested they should visit Foyles, the bookshop, while they were waiting, and he would treat his son to any titles on agriculture he would like to have. ‘That way,’ said the old man. ‘You can use your time usefully until you’re better again.’ Not if, Joss noticed, when. Mr Deerman was a man of few emotions, usually leaving his wife to ‘do the feelings thingy’ as he used to say, waving his hand. So Joss knew this meant something.
‘You spend as long as you want looking,’ Mr Deerman had said the next morning in Foyles. ‘I admire your independence on this farming venture, but just occasionally let your old father give you a hand, eh?’ He blew his nose on a voluminous handkerchief. ‘I wouldn’t mind popping over to my club for an hour, if you can manage on your own?’
‘Of course.’
Mr Deerman pulled his overcoat forward by the collar. ‘If you need me, send one of the staff. You know where my club is. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll be back in an hour.’ With that, he walked away, straight-backed, clearly grateful to be let off for a while.
The next hour was one Joss wished acutely he could have shared with Tom, walking between these large oak bookcases filled with new, beautifully crafted books. The smell of the place was all of its own. It smelled of intellect, of fascination. He wandered over to the literature section and found two beautifully tooled, mid-brown leather hardbacks of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native. He carried them over to the agricultural/science section and looked at a set of Henry Stephens’ Book of the Farm, in six bound volumes of maroonish-red with bright gilt titles to their spines. Joss opened one, looked with pleasure at the detailed line drawings, beautifully executed, of the crops, the tools, the ways of farming. And he realised, yes, he could sit and read, and help himself. There was something more than the blur of opiates and the fear that so often snatched his breath.
There had been several bombardments up and down the line but Tom was reading Joss’s latest letter, with the two Hardy volumes by his side. He would see if Barratt would allow him to leave them on the dugout table when he was not reading them; the concern for not getting them dirty or otherwise damaged was pressing. Barratt rolled
his eyes as he watched Tom reading yet another letter in the sun, which was shining in on the fire step. To think he had initially thought him a sullen, uncommunicative youth when he had first appeared, nearly a year ago. Barratt hesitated. Yes, it really was getting on for a year. Even the declining strength of this early September sun struck him.
We waited for the old chap, Joss wrote. My father and I very formally on the incoming platform. When the train arrived, Father strode up to the guards' carriage and boomed “Mongrel dog for a John Deerman. Is he aboard?” Nico was, and I went in to see him. He was in good health with his fur all awry, as usual. He was beside himself, his entire back end swinging with his tail. I had wondered if he’d recognise me, but of course he did. In fact, the crate he was in was in danger of falling sideways and the guard suggested I should leave him alone “before he does himself a mischief”. Nico’s ability to cope with virtually anything always cheers me up – I’d imagine he’s been charming the guards all the way here, and who, I have it on good authority, were making a big fuss of him. When we arrived at Worcester we were met by the family car and Nico hopped in as though he thought: Well, of course, a car to ride in. You will be pleased to know that as I write he’s laying upside down, paws in the air, fast asleep and snoring for England.
Tom smiled, and folded the letter into his breast pocket. As he had just come back with the other bearers after a last look for the wounded following another attack, his eyes had rested on a split open canister of a minenwerfer which oozed its undetonated yellow paste into the ground. Tom stared at it. It seemed odd that this innocuous-looking substance, which smelled like marzipan, could be so dangerous in combination. Yet the threat of seeing a minenwerfer tumbling leisurely through the sky could reduce him to prostration in seconds. But now this weapon was beached, like some rotting mechanical amphibian, rendered useless. Tom shuffled over to it. The paste had dissolved into a liquid and settled in oily patches. Any small plants that had clung on in the wreckage nearby had withered and turned a crusted brown; even a poppy had been stained ash-grey. A crow landed nearby, seeking carrion. It hopped around on its black pantalooned legs in the filth, its beady eyes curious and fearlessly innocent. With a few jumps, it reached the paste, and began pecking it and immediately recoiled, shaking its head as if trying to spit it out. Tom lobbed a spent bullet at it to frighten it away. The crow flapped over to the bullet and started worrying it. A shot fired and the bird flew up panicked, over the barbed wire, then away into the clear September-blue sky. Tom stared at the man-made thickets of barbed wire in the middle distance and realised that, what he had taken for scraps of old cloth, were in fact the slight, impaled bodies of birds.