by S. C. Howe
Sykes walked for days, without an aim or the comfort that a distance of time would fade, or even ameliorate the memory of that last day when he had ceased being who he thought he was. So, he walked through the spring landscape of the midlands, using up the paltry savings he had on him, through high-banked ancient lanes with the cathedrals of trees arching over, or through bleak straight enclosure lanes into the midland counties, all the time his mind going over and over that day. At night in sweating nightmares, it visited him like an evil presence, when his body succumbed to exhaustion. Always the same dream it seemed, always the same agonising detail. It had been one of those cold raining evenings in the trench, a few weeks before the armistice. Sykes and Richards had playing dice before Sykes had to go on sentry duty. The rum ration had been late arriving and Sykes had been keen to half-inch some of it, as he had put it to Richards. Richards and he had fallen in together from the first, because they came from the same east midland town and became “as thick as thieves”, as one of the sergeants had said. It was a friendship based on leg-pulling, high spirits, loud talking, practical jokes, and a creeping affection, neither would have admitted to. If there was a good-natured rumpus going on, Richards and Sykes would be at the heart of it. ‘Partners in Crime’ was another name contrived by the CO and they worked hard to live up to it, because, as Richards had said “You might as well be “hung for a sheep as a lamb”. But, as the war ground on in that last autumn, Sykes had started to look for more ‘action’ as he called it, to fill up those cold, dreary hours between pointless, terrifying bombardments. And the rum ration caught his fancy. Technically it was strictly monitored and served out in rations, but Sykes knew someone, who knew someone who...and for a bribe he got the odd flagon smuggled in and he and Richards and a few others would snaffle it in innocuous-looking enamel mugs when the rest of the line was asleep or otherwise engaged. On this drizzling dark night, however, the rum ration had been held up along the support lines and the time in which Sykes could do his ‘little bit of business’ was being extinguished by the minute. It was going to be a good scoop tonight, from what he could gather, so he was unusually jumpy that evening. Just as the minute hand of his watch jolted towards the hour when he had to take over the sentry post, he saw the ‘blokes he knew, tidy blokes’ coming from the communication trench.
‘Ere,’ he said, unwinding his scarf from around his neck and the lower part of his face and stuffing it into Richards’ hands. ‘Pretend to be me on the lookout, will you, and I’ll see you get the first pickings, before the lads.’
‘Pretend to be like you?’ Richards said with a snort. ‘A complete tosser?’ And ducked as Sykes pretended to thump him round the back of the head.
‘Only be a tick,’ said Sykes. ‘Just keep the scarf around your face and look out over the ground.’
‘Busy doing bugger all, like you normally do.’
Richards saw the wide grin on Sykes’ face as he walked backwards up the trench, holding his thumb up, he then scarpered up the line to the Rum Ration Boys.
The shell when it landed created a pit so deep no-one could work out which body bit belonged to which soldier. Sykes had heard the shell coming in and the force of the explosion drove a vicious wind up the trench and knocked him backwards off his feet; a shell launched out of boredom from the other side. Sykes had run back, his mouth gaping and his eyes wide, staring, shouting ‘No – No – Please, no. NO!’ As though that word alone would reverse the last few minutes. He had crouched in the blood-logged mud, tearing through the bits and shouting. Shouting like a crazy man.
The rest of the lads who were in on the rum scheme didn’t say a word to the officers or sergeant about Sykes’ remarkable survival. In fact, one of the lads didn’t talk again, full stop. One of the officers had jumped when he saw Sykes in the immediate aftermath, as though he had just seen a ghost. It was difficult burying assorted bits of bodies, so large sacks had to do for Richards and the others. However hard he searched, Sykes couldn’t find anything of his mate – no piece of cloth that he could be sure was from his uniform, or anything from his pockets, which had always been like magpie nests. Nothing. What he couldn’t know was that these things had been blown yards away into no man’s land, along with a spray from Richards and several other soldiers who had been walking past the sentry post when the shell hit. ‘Missing Presumed Dead’ went down on the records – what a sanitized way to describe it.
For the whole of the next day Sykes had sat, statue-still, and stared at the dirty sand-bagged wall only a few feet in front of him. He obeyed orders robotically. Then came the end of hostilities on that grey morning of light rain. Sykes had adopted this curious manner of looking around him as though he was searching for someone who had just said they were popping out and would be back in a tick. The medical officer saw it and Sykes was moved to one of the large general hospitals to work in a morgue. Sykes tried to joke that a bunch of stiffs wouldn’t worry him, but realised he didn’t find himself funny anymore. When he was at last demobilized, he had – almost – re-invented himself. The early hours were the ones he dreaded, so he took to the drifting life and to begging back in Blighty, and, just staying alive, seemed to fill those great yawing places in his mind. The nights were always the worse, the unpicking and re-assembling in his mind of those minutes when he lost all innocence, that moment when he had killed the best mate he had ever had. So he was glad when he had bumped into Barratt who had tagged along, because he was probably inventing himself too. They never talked to each other like that. They were reinventing. But not quite. As the weather grew warmer it had nearly worked, this reinvention. But Sykes knew it had not succeeded and knew that he just couldn’t do this anymore. Deciding not to leave a note, and after a particularly violent nightmare where he was screaming in the pitch black for Richards, he had taken Whistle to a large dogs’ home he knew about, signed him in, then took a train miles away. He had walked and walked and found a pool in the middle of lonely moorland, drawn out a gun and discharged the last bullet into his mouth in the place where the new green of spring sprinkled trees and hedgerow, and the confetti of blossom dusted hawthorns in the distance.
For a while no-one was particularly concerned where Sykes had gone, but when Whistle made his way back to Heathend, skeletal and distressed, search parties of those who had known Sykes in that last year, and even some who had not, combed the countryside. But Sykes had made a good job of it, if that’s a description one can use; he had made sure he shot himself in that marshy, lost place, counties away, where his body and the gun would disappear for good under the closing arms of stagnant water and mud, in the final embrace of the trenches.
Whistle being Whistle, made his home at Heathend, but he never ran again for the joy of it; at nights he would lie in a tight bundle, worried eyes scanning the doorway, waiting for the man who would never return.
Barratt had found the identity tag from Briggs in the thick mud of no man’s land days after the explosion. He had then written a letter to Briggs’ mother, sitting on an upturned rations’ box at a rickety, makeshift desk with a candle guttering in a tin in a cramped dugout. And now Mrs Briggs had written to him, care of his parents, telling him that the war memorial in the little industrial town in which she lived, and on which her son’s name was etched, had been completed. Barratt had taken the train and now stared at the new memorial that stood rather awkwardly against the backdrop of soot-blackened brick shops and factories. A weak sun had come out and Barratt stood stock still, feeling its warmth on his back. His eyes found Briggs’ name immediately: R. H. N. Briggs, Second Lieutenant. The names were in alphabetical order, not rank, and that comforted Barratt, although he would not have been able to say why. He looked at lists of other names, whole lists of them worked in black letters on the nice new stone, and his mind lurched and he tried to force the memories down, his jaw cramping painfully with the effort. He was aware of a person near to him. He looked up and saw Alice. She came to his side and held his hand. Barratt’s face cr
umpled; he tried to hide his face in his elbow, but she held him until the tears came and he wept openly.
‘I wish I could tell Briggs how sorry I am,’ he said at last, drying his eyes with his sleeve. ‘Just once.’
‘You have,’ Alice said.
Barratt took in a deep breath, as though bracing himself, then felt in his coat pocket and pulled out a worn black fountain pen.
‘Briggs left it behind,’ he explained, laying it on the steps of the memorial, and they walked away, back to the future and memories.
EPILOGUE
The day had been sunny and warm, with china-blue skies and bright white clouds. It was now early evening and Joss and Tom squatted by the flowerbed by the house. It was freshly dug and waiting for seeds. Tom went in, lit two lamps and brought them out, the lights flaring as he walked.
‘It was only a year ago that I did this,’ he said kneeling down beside Joss. The lamp cast a pool of light onto his face; he looked timeless, forever young. They opened the packets and gently tapped out the seeds. Tom picked them off his hand with the tips of his fingers of his uninjured hand. The tiny specks lay, like secrets. Joss scored a fine groove in the soil and gently laid the seeds on the earth; Tom sprinkled the tilth over them. It was a burial, and a beginning.
The next day they converted an arable field to a vegetable plot to provide them with food, worked slowly, partly because of their injuries old and new but mostly because they understood they did not need to hurry. If something wasn’t done today, it could be done tomorrow. Tom led Jasper by the halter as Joss steadied the plough. Tom discarded his jacket, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, stopped the horse, and stood there feeling the sensation of sun on his skin and the breeze against his face, allowed himself the feeling. Joss sat beside the plough, Tom joined him. Helped him off with his jacket and shirt, and did not flinch when he saw the jagged healing of Joss’s left side. Joss took off his boots and socks, wriggled his toes, and for the first time, did not automatically stare at the remains of his left foot, but saw two feet. That’s all. Two feet. Flexing his shoulders, he did the exercises he had been advised to do, and which he had resented; now it felt quite natural to flex here, to stretch there. The sun fingered his back and its gentle heat warmed him. He rolled his shoulders, felt the discs moving in his spine, but the pain no longer felt like the constant backdrop to his life now; it was a part of it but did not have to dictate everything. There were things he could do, and things he wanted to do; he would work with what he could do, not battle against what he couldn’t.
Tom’s arm would heal up, the bruises would go, like a tree which has been broken, the next growth could be stronger. Peering over to the hedges and coppice that he had cut back so ruthlessly last autumn, he winced, saw some were little more than stumps. Then he noticed tiny green shoots were emerging from them. The urge to live carried on.
The sun dipped behind the plateau, and the heath disappeared in the dark. The large flaring sun shone and shadows fell long and clear before them as they walked, scattering seeds in the carefully ploughed grooves. If anyone had seen them from a distance they might have remarked that they looked like two men living off the land, a timeless scene, in harmony and perpetual, like the bedrock below the chaos of existence.
It was almost dark when they returned Jasper to the stables. They unhooked him from the plough, fed him, and then walked back to the light of the kitchen.
If anyone had been watching later, however, they would have seen lamps swing into the barns and implements being dragged up the track by Tom and Joss, the lights from the hurricane lamps touching the late trumpets of daffodils and emerging self-seeded hollyhocks which grew by the entrance into the farm. Mingling with the clanking and the sound of wheels, there would have also been a curious laughter, sounding boldly in the dark. Then stillness and silence, as, one by one, the lights in the farmhouse windows went out and the farm seemed to withdraw into itself, turn back to a dark outline huddled in the lee of the plateau, like a silent brooding thing, in-turned, shutting out the world.
The night deepened. A fine rain started falling. Falling on the rows of machinery stretched out along the track that led to the railway halt, smudging the handwritten ink letters of the For Sale signs. Then, for a few minutes, a watery moon emerged, and picked out the brass birdcage standing to one side with its door swinging open, looking solitary and defeated in the rain of this new spring.
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Copyright © S C Howe, 2017
The right of S C Howe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The book cover image is copyright to Emma Manners
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-78623-987-7 in electronic format
ISBN 978-1-78623-087-4 in printed format
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