by Anna Hope
The land here, though still ravaged, looks more like countryside than the Somme, further south. Here signs of life are returning to the farms. Here, even after everything, fields still look like fields—like land where something still may grow.
The convoy passes a farmer on his plow. The farmer looks up at the escort and the scarred old ambulance as they pass by. He returned to this farm just last year. He was wounded at Verdun and lost an eye, and was released back home, secretly relieved. An eye seemed a small price to pay for his life. But he left the farm to stay with his father-in-law in Burgundy after the German advance in 1918, after the Germans raced forward in that spring offensive and requisitioned his farmhouse, his cellar, and his lands. After they drank him dry, killed and ate his chickens—stunned by abundance, boys who had been starving behind the lines. After they got so drunk that he and his wife and children were woken by them, shouting in the courtyard, naked, reeling, their helmets held on their crotches, empty bottles of wine rolling around them on the ground. He knew then that it was over. That the Germans were finished. That the advance had been stalled by these drunken, starving boys.
These are some of the pictures he carries of the war. Now he only wants to be left alone. He wants to get through his plowing without disturbing any ordnance that may have been left here. He knows of many farmers who have lost limbs, or worse, trying to make the most of their fields.
He wonders briefly who the approaching cars carry: a foreign dignitary, perhaps? But he doesn’t wonder long. He bends back to his work, hunched against the drizzle, against the gray skies, thinking of eating his dinner in front of the fire, sitting alongside his wife.
. . . . . . . . . . .
In one fierce, clean movement, Ada slices through the knots, and with a small puff that looks like smoke, the string falls away.
On the top are Michael’s letters to her and Jack, two thick piles of them, each held in place with another knotted piece of string. She lifts them out and puts them beside her on the bed. Not yet.
Lying beneath them is a smaller, loose collection of picture postcards. One is a picture of a church. Albert, it says, on the bottom right-hand corner. At the top of the bell tower is a statue of a woman with a baby, the woman holding the child in her outstretched arms, dangling it over the empty air. On the back, her son’s handwriting:
The woman is the Virgin Mary.
She’s been leaning like this for a couple of years.
They say if she falls then the war will be over.
Pray she falls when we’re winning Mum!
It was the first card he sent her, after he arrived in France in 1917, and the day she received it, she had it tacked up on the kitchen wall. It made her uneasy, though; there was something about that woman, dangling over the empty air, holding so desperately onto her child that reminded her of herself.
She had the same chart on her wall as everyone else she knew; it had come free with the Daily Mail, and the town of Albert was right in the middle of the British Zone, marked red on the map. She drew a circle around it. Now she could picture him somewhere at least, could look at the church—see something that he had seen. It sounded like a good English name, too: Albert, easy in the mouth, not like some of the other names on the chart: Ypres, Thiepval, Poperinghe. She wouldn’t have had the first clue how to pronounce them.
She shuffles through the contents of the box. More postcards fall out from beneath that first: a picture of a river, and a riverbank, and picnicking people wearing summery clothes. the somme, it says on the bottom. On the back of the postcard Michael has written “It doesn’t look much like this anymore!” She remembers what she did when this postcard came to the door: searched the faces on the riverbank, relieved when the French didn’t look very different from the people at home.
The last picture is of the cobbled street of a town. Something is stuck faceup on to the back of it. She peels it carefully away; it is a photograph of Michael.
She remembers now: He sent it to her at the same time as the one that she has in the frame downstairs in the parlor, not long after he arrived. They must have been taken seconds from each other, and by the same photographer, because the same background—a painted wall—shows on each. He is not smiling here, though; his eyes are guarded and his edges are blurred, so that it is difficult to see where the wall ends and his uniform begins. She knows he must have moved as the shutter came down, and that this is the explanation for the way the photograph has turned out, but still, she doesn’t like it. It is as though he is already moving into a future in which he doesn’t exist.
Underneath are three smaller pieces of light brown card. These postcards have no pictures on them, and each of them reads the same, with printed writing ranged all the way down the left-hand side:
I am quite well
I have been admitted into hospital {sick/and am going on well/ wounded/and hope to be discharged soon}.
I am being sent down to the base.
I have received your {letter, dated _______
/telegram/parcel}.
Letter follows at first opportunity.
I have received no letter from you {lately/for a long time}.
The first two cards are from June 1917, from when he first went into battle. She remembers that they didn’t receive a letter for over a week, and then these postcards came, one day after the other, with all of the phrases crossed out except one: I am quite well.
How relieved she had been to get these, however little they said.
When they finally printed casualty lists for his company, she fell on the paper, running her finger down the list, frantically searching for his name among the injured and killed. It wasn’t there. Still, they had to wait a week for a proper letter from him. Meanwhile, she could read and try to understand what it meant: There had been fifty survivors from two hundred men.
And Ada knew then that, whatever her son had seen, it was something that took him somewhere far beyond her reach.
One more field service card remains in the box. This one is dated September 14, 1917. It came after two weeks of silence. Two weeks in which she had written to him four times. Two weeks in which every morning, when the mail came, she would run into the hall; in which every evening Jack would come into the kitchen, hat twisted in his fist, pretending that he wasn’t looking to see if there was a letter propped up against the teapot for him to read. This card, too, read the same:
I am quite well.
It was the last that they heard from him: September 14, 1917.
They scoured the papers, but this time there was nothing about his company. Nothing about any action they had been involved in, no clue.
At the bottom of the box is a letter in a small brown envelope. She takes it out and holds it in her hands. For something so heavy it weighs nothing at all.
It arrived on a Monday in September, a day of late summer sun. She was hanging the sheets on the line. There were women out all the way along, doing the same, their gardens garlanded with flapping white. She hadn’t heard the tap of the letter box, and when she came back into the dim hall, she could just make out the shape of a letter lying on the mat. She bent to pick it up and saw a French postmark and Jack’s name in an official type. She dropped it on the floor and walked straight back outside.
There was the sun, hitting the whiteness of the sheets on her line, and all the way down the row of gardens, as though all the women of London were surrendering at once. Just in front of her was the rabbit hutch that Jack hadn’t got around to fixing yet. She stared at the place where the hexagonal wires were ripped away from the gray unvarnished wood. A fox had come and torn them years ago. Next door’s cat was sleeping beside it, lazy in a patch of warmth, its belly falling and rising in the sun.
The next thing she remembers is standing in the kitchen with the shadows lengthening around her, and Jack coming into the room. Holding the letter out towar
d her. Telling her to sit down.
“Don’t open it,” she said.
But he did. She watched his face as he read. His eyes as they moved along the page. Stop. Move back to the top. And in those tiny movements she felt her life, her future, contract and collapse.
“It’s not true.”
He put the letter on the table. Pushed it toward her.
She looked at her husband’s hands, at the spray of black hairs on the top of his fingers.
“You have to read it, Ada.”
She took it from him.
Dear Mr. Hart,
I am very sorry to have to tell you that your son Michael died of his wounds on the 11th September.
Yours,
—
These were the only words, struck into the page. Not even a name, just a signature at the bottom, but blurred, as though it were written in haste, or in rain.
“It’s not true,” she said, looking up at him. “I’d have known if it was. It’s not true.”
No further letter came—nothing to say how their son had died. Jack wrote to Michael’s company, but they did not receive a reply. Everyone got two letters. Everyone she knew who had lost someone. Most got more than that: a letter from someone who had been there at the death, someone who had words of comfort, some small detail to impart.
She was sure there had been a mistake.
For a while afterward, people stopped her in the street to say how sorry they were. How he was a credit to her, as though in his dying he had somehow raised her stock. She just stood there while they talked, until they passed on again. She did not take out the mourning dress, packed in a chest at the end of her bed, folded with mothballs and tissue paper: the dress she wore last for her mother, twenty years ago.
Then, in the winter of 1918, when the war was over, the boys began to come home. They were everywhere suddenly, swarming the streets in their demob suits and fifteen-shilling coats. It was as though some contrary magic had occurred, over in France, as though, far from dying, they had flourished over there in the boggy fields, bred themselves again from the fertile soil. The papers were rife with stories, with miracles: boys who had been hiding behind enemy lines, had walked the whole way home, who hadn’t even known that the war had finished, but had turned up in the back garden ragged and filthy and in time for their tea.
That was when she saw him first: at the edge of a group of lads on a street corner, his back turned away from her. She went up to him; the boy turned, but it wasn’t him and she hurried away, sweaty, shaking. Then a few days later, there he was, arm in arm with a girl in the park. She started after him, calling his name. It wasn’t Michael. It kept happening. She would run after him, only stopping when she saw that it was someone else—someone the same height, with the same tilt of the head, or the same color hair. Or the boy she was following would simply disappear.
Often, restless in the night, she would leave Jack sleeping and climb into her son’s bed instead, lying on the narrow mattress in the narrow room, with the football pictures stuck to the wall. She began to see him there. She would wake to find that he was with her, sitting on the bed. She was never surprised. She reached for him, but he put his hand out, as though to stop her. There were shadows moving about nearby.
“Who are they?” she said to him.
“Shhh.” He put his finger to his lips and smiled. “Don’t worry, Mum, they’re all right. They’re only dead.”
One day, near the end of the long winter of 1918, a doctor came to the house. He gave her an injection, a quick scratch on her arm. When she came around she was back in the bedroom that she shared with Jack, and Jack was in the chair in the corner. The light was clear and cold. He came over and helped her to her feet.
“All right now,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
On their way downstairs they passed Michael’s bedroom. The door was open, the room stripped bare. Only the blank spaces and darker borders showed where his football pictures had been; only the tiny flecks of the flour and water that he had used as a paste. She looked into the room and back to her husband.
“Where are his things?” Her tongue felt too large in her mouth.
“I’ve put them away.” He looked guilty, but bullish, his jaw set tight.
She thought that she hated him then, but that even the hate seemed distant, as if it were happening to someone else—close, but hard to reach, as though trapped behind a pane of glass.
There’s a sound downstairs: The back door opening. Jack’s tread in the kitchen.
Ada scrabbles the postcards together. The sky outside the windows is dark.
“Ada?”
The meat, left at the butcher. The meal she was going to cook. The day, disappeared. Where has it gone? She pushes the letters down into the box, but the official letter she keeps out, slipping it into the pocket of her apron. She tries to tie the string, but her fingers are clumsy and it is useless and he is already on the stairs. She puts the box back in the wardrobe, closing it as quickly as she can. As Jack opens the door, she turns to him, smoothing down her hair.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing—I—was … cleaning.”
“In here?” He looks at her empty hands, back up to her face.
“Yes—I—haven’t been in here for months, so … I thought I’d check, see if it needed anything.” Her heart is going like the clappers.
“Cleaning with what?”
“Nothing, yet. I was—just about to start.” She feels herself flush to the roots of her hair.
Jack looks around the room, takes in the bed, the scissors, still lying there. “Looks all right to me.”
“Yes,” she says. “It does.” She edges past him, picks up the scissors, and hurries downstairs, grateful for the cool, dim kitchen. She can hear his footsteps overhead. She listens as he walks across their son’s floor. It sounds like he is standing by the window, looking out. The footsteps turn, hesitate. Will he open the wardrobe? See that the box has been disturbed? She hardly dare breathe. But the footsteps cross the floor again, then leave the room and make their way downstairs. She reaches for the sink to hold herself up.
“Dark in here.” He comes into the room behind her.
“Yes.” She lights a match to the gas. Yellow light laps the walls.
“Is there nothing to eat?”
“I’m sorry. I—forgot.”
“You forgot?”
“Sorry,” she says, turning to him now. Twenty-five years. She waits for him to say something, to mention the date. But he doesn’t.
“I’m going to go and get a piece of fish,” he says eventually, steadily. “Would you like one, too?”
She nods, wretched.
He gets out his cap and puts it on. “I’ll see you later, then.”
She watches him go. Sinks to a chair. Thinks of the meat, left on the counter with the butcher’s boy. What must he have thought of her, that boy, running away like that? She puts her head in her hands.
Some silly woman, getting old.
Running after ghosts.
Shouting for her dead son in the street.
. . . . . . . . . . .
The field ambulance carrying the coffin passes the British and French troops who line the streets of Boulogne. It passes through the gates of the old town, then climbs the steep hill that overlooks the harbor, crossing the bridge that leads to the fortified entrance to the château and then under the great stone arch, drawing up in the courtyard, gravel crunching beneath its tires.
Eight soldiers carry the coffin along the twisting corridors of the old château, past waiting French troops, to the officers’ mess in the old library, where a temporary chapelle ardente, a burning chapel, has been ordained. The room has been decorated with flags and palms, its floor strewn with the yellow, orange, and red of autumn flowers and leaves.
A guard of French soldiers comes to watch over the body. All are from the Eighth Regiment and all have recently been awarded the Légion d’honneur for their conduct in the war. Candles are lit. The soldiers stand on either side of the coffin with their arms reversed, rifles held against their shoulders. One of them, a thirty-year-old veteran, looks briefly at the coffin before casting his eyes to the ground. The box is raw and rough—not the coffin of one who will be buried in state. He wonders if this understatement is a peculiarly British thing.
The British he knew in the war were crazy, funny men. One, in particular, he will never forget. He met him one night in an estaminet, just behind the lines. The English boy was eating egg and fried potatoes. That was what they all asked for, the Tommies, all the time, in their funny, blunt voices: all they wanted: Egg and chips! Egg and chips! This one was small and stocky. When the French soldier sat down in front of him with his beer and the Tommy looked up, the solider knew, without speaking, what they would do to each other before too long. And they did: at the back of a ruined church, by ancient gravestones, their bellies full of beer and fried food.
Afterward, he remembers, the boy broke down and cried. And he knew that it was not for what they had done, or not really, but for everything else. And they held each other, between the crumbled stones, until the birds started singing, and a bleached sun rose over the remains of the church.
That was in June 1916, just before the Somme.
The French soldier stares at the ground, blazing with color in the candlelight. He looks at the leaves, at the flowers at his feet.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Evelyn packs up her satchel, preoccupied. Robin spoke to her as he left, and she replied to him, but now that he has gone, she cannot recall anything of what either of them said. She has even forgotten to be angry with him for earlier, for interfering with Rowan Hind. She switches off the lights and stands there for a moment, looking out. Through the window, the afternoon sky, which had looked already black with the lights on, is revealed to be a high, deepening blue.