The Lives She Left Behind

by James Long

  It was the pills, Jo thought, as she stood beside the trench, barely aware of the others still talking about it. She felt a little sick, dizzy, her head loose from the moorings of her feet, only slightly better when she knelt down. Then she touched her trowel to the earth again, and that was when the earth threw something back at her up the blade to wash through her hand and arm and head like a spinning tide of light. She rocked backwards and stared at the surface of the trench. Next time she reached out cautiously but as the trowel scraped through the loose crumbs into the undisturbed core of hard soil it came again but differently, more gently, as if her hand was a key sliding into a lock and lifting the tumblers to match it. She held herself still, entranced, feeling something flow the other way, from her body down into this ground which seemed like a door into more of her than she had ever known was there. She looked all around for the source, fixing her eyes on the other trench, and saw Conrad come marching up to it with Rupert beside him, bringing news of unexpected danger and forcing them to their feet. All the way down the hill she kept looking back as if expecting the trench to be marked by columns of flame, and down at the bottom, as the day and their plans and the prospect of summer fun drained, she felt most sad that some outstanding possibility of knowledge had been held out then jerked away. Fragments of a different story began to prod at her.

  Dozer called them all around him, detailing off the diggers in groups of two or three to put a ring round the base of the hill, showing them on the map where he wanted them to go. ‘You three girls,’ he said, ‘you’re young and fit, ain’t you? Go round to the main path, then up to the top of the hill. Check there’s nobody up there, then take this track down to the far side. Do you see? There’s another path there and I expect there’s a stile. Stay there and warn off any walkers until I come and get you. Okay? Don’t go anywhere near where we’ve been digging, will you?’

  Toiling up the hill, Ali said ‘Maybe it will all turn out to be a fuss about nothing.’

  Lucy said, ‘Yes, Conrad’s pretty short-sighted. Must be.’

  ‘Is that meant to be nasty?’ Ali retorted.

  ‘No, I just meant he’s got thick glasses.’

  ‘I think he knows what he’s talking about.’

  Lucy changed the subject. ‘What are we going to do?’ she said. ‘I was just starting to enjoy it.’

  ‘We’re going to wait and see what happens,’ said Ali, ‘and keep our fingers crossed.’

  Jo stayed silent. They came out of trees into a clearing that covered the summit of the hill and there, ahead, a tower rose from the very top. She was surprised and not at all surprised to see it.

  ‘There’s nobody around,’ Lucy said.

  ‘I’ll go up there and check,’ said Jo.

  ‘I don’t think you should,’ Ali objected. ‘The trenches must be just down there in the trees. Supposing it blew up? You’d be right in line.’

  ‘I won’t be long,’ Jo said, and ran to the doorway. She saw a date over it and lettering in what she thought might be Greek. From as early as she could remember she had always liked towers, and she climbed the spiral staircase to the small chamber at the top. There was nobody there. She looked at the scarred patches of plaster still clinging to the walls, desecrated by penknives, read ‘Spurs’ and then just next to it ‘F & G’. She stared at that one, felt the carved letters with her fingers, and a sense of contentment came to her through her fingertips. ‘G,’ she said to herself. ‘G for Gally.’ She looked down at the trees towards where she thought the trenches lay and knew the boy had come this way before he fell.

  She heard Ali’s voice below. ‘Jo, come down. We mustn’t stay here.’

  They sat by the path looking out across a meadow but no one came that way. They talked about their stories and Jo agreed she would stand behind Ali and prompt her if she lost her way, but mostly she sat quietly and let the other two talk because Gally was with her again, not speaking to her but with her, just as if she was sitting there on the grass. After a long time two uniformed policemen came puffing round the hill, hot with hurry and with the weight of the signs they carried. They tied incident tape across the gateway and gave the girls unnecessary instructions about going back to their camp by a safe route. Bomb Disposal would be along soon, they said, with the air of people privy to higher secrets and dangerous affairs.

  Back at the campsite, there was no sign of the teacher or the boy. Before supper, Rupert called them all together.

  ‘I’m really sorry to tell you this,’ he said, ‘but the dig’s over. We’ve found some sort of wartime bunker. I’ve been talking to the War Museum and they think it’s part of the BRO network – that’s the British Resistance Organisation, put in place after Dunkirk when we thought Hitler was going to invade at any minute. It seems this one got lost in the wash.’

  ‘What happens now?’ asked Dozer.

  ‘They’re going to make it safe. If possible they’ll remove the explosives, because the bunker is a pretty remarkable find. There’ll be a bit of work to do afterwards if so but only for people who’ve done the right training. That’s seven of my students, basically, because we did the Lancaster bomber crash site last year.’

  Dozer grunted. ‘I could have sworn I was at Omaha Beach for the D-Day digs. Can’t have been me then, but there was a bloke who looked just like you, Rupe.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dozer, I forgot you’re trained too. Of course you’re welcome to stay. I need all the help I can get, but I’m really sorry to say the rest of you will have to leave first thing in the morning, so let’s make the best of it and have a good time tonight.’

  For all his words, the meal was a quiet affair full of anticlimax but afterwards, when the diggers were lying around the fire and the sticks began to crackle, Rupert passed bottles of wine around the circle, clapped his hands and said, ‘Right, enough moping. Where’s tonight’s story?’

  There was silence, then Conrad said, ‘The girls are doing it, aren’t they?’

  Rupert couldn’t see them. ‘Are they here?’

  Three figures moved from darkness into firelight and the ring of flame-splashed faces turned to them in expectant silence. They wore masks cut from blue plastic and red tea-towel turbans wound around their hair. There was an appreciative round of applause.

  Two stepped forward, one standing behind the other. ‘We have two stories for you tonight,’ said the one in front, ‘and each story is about a castle. I am the Lady Alicia and my story is about the first earth castle from when the Normans came.’

  The Lady Alicia was very clearly Ali and she told them a tale of an old sword, dug up as they built the ramparts. She forgot her way once or twice and the girl behind her muttered words to get her back on track, but the sword proved to have a mystical power which frightened the invading Normans, and the ghost of a long-dead British warrior made a timely appearance to free a prisoner threatened with torture. The story came to an abrupt halt and when the audience was finally sure it wasn’t going to start again, they clapped.

  The two of them sat down and the third girl took her place. ‘I am the Lady Louisa,’ she said, ‘and my story is about the second castle and the wood they cut to build it.’

  Her tale was of the Normans felling oaks for their new palisade and of the brave girl who came to save the woods on her white pony, and how she and the pony distracted the Normans by dancing a pretty dance together until they offered her any reward she named and she asked them to spare half the trees.

  Lucy’s story had been long, including demonstrations of the dance, and the audience clapped then shuffled on their logs as it ended. A buzz of conversation had just started when Jo stepped forward and held up both hands.

  ‘I have a story too,’ she said, and her friends looked at her in astonishment.

  Jo hadn’t known that she had a story but when she had stood at the top of the tower, when she had felt the carved initials with her fingers, a whole collection of stories and fragments of stories had come fluttering to her from acros
s the broad landscape to which the shadows were pointing. Some, just fragile shapes of stories, had passed on as if they were only reminding her they were there but one had lodged and grown into words which seemed to be Gally’s words.

  ‘I am Lady Joanna and the third castle was made of stone,’ she said in a rush, then she came to a complete halt as if she had forgotten what to say next. They waited as she stared at the fire and then away up the hill into the darkness, towards the old fortress hidden above them in the night. Her audience was frozen in a separate and combined horror of keen embarrassment. The other girls stepped forward to whisper to her but she shook her head and held up a hand for silence though silence was all there was.

  She began again in a slower and more certain voice. ‘The third castle was to be built of stone and the new Norman lords forced the able-bodied men from all around to build it. These men had never seen shaped stone, mortared layer on layer. Their church was wooden. Their houses were mud and wood. Oppression in stone began to rise above them – everlasting oppression.’

  The other girls were looking at each other in surprise but the speaker’s voice gathered strength with every sentence.

  ‘The Saxon men of the village dragged each stone up to the top of the mound. It cost them sweat if they pulled hard enough and blood if they did not because the Normans were hard, hard men and urged them on with whips.’

  She paused, this time with complete confidence, and there was no more movement from her audience.

  ‘There was a family in the village. A man, his wife and their only surviving son. The man did not believe in war – never had. He believed only in protecting his own and he had been hurt when the Normans first came to that place, cut in the arm by a sword when he shielded his wife. His son, as yet just half a man, was the pride of his life but the Normans took the boy because the father could not work.

  ‘The boy came back that first night, bruised and flayed and trying his best to be brave, but in the morning he could hardly get up. He left the cottage in the last of the darkness trying to hide the tears running down his face and when full day came, the man and the woman went to look across the valley to the bare top of the hill, where a stack of cut tree trunks marked the skyline and the hard walls of the castle tower had begun to coil up inside their wooden scaffold.

  ‘They went as close as they could but they could not see him so the man hugged his wife and told her his arm was healing and he would go to offer himself again so that he could help their son. She sat there alone on the grass in her misery after he had left, unable to see where he was amongst the toiling ants, but hearing the shouts of the soldiers and the screams of the workers.

  ‘And then after the sun’s shadow had moved a yard, there was turmoil in the valley and a man bursting through the bushes by the stream, and she saw it was her husband racing back to her through the grass. Then other men came after him, four soldiers shouting, and two of them seized him and held him under their knees. One raised a sword that cut the sun in silver and hacked it down, lifting it again shining red. She ran at them screaming her fear and her defiance but their leader wiped his sword with a look that said it was crueller to keep her alive than to kill her too. They walked away and she knelt over her man and heard from his last breath that their son was dead.’

  There was a thickness in the way of her voice as she finished, a sob strangled in her throat. She stopped, took two deep breaths and looked around at her audience. ‘When castles rise, they are built with poor men’s blood,’ she said. Her head was suddenly flooded with a wealth of other stories – of a brother and sister in love, of brave men making a desperate stand, of a marriage, of an excavation and a burial. They swirled in her head, tripping over each other until she sat down, utterly exhausted by her words and her thoughts.

  They clapped and clapped her until Rupert got to his feet.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘all three of you. That was quite wonderful. We don’t often think about the folk who had to do the hard work, do we?’ He nudged a log back into the fire with his toe and everyone watched the fountain of sparks in silence. He turned back towards Jo. ‘I know the place you’re talking about,’ he said.

  They took off their masks. ‘Of course you do,’ Jo replied. ‘We set the stories here.’

  ‘No, that can’t be right. Three castles? There was only one here. Are you telling me you didn’t have somewhere else in mind?’

  The girls were shaking their heads.

  ‘Are you sure? There’s a place just like that,’ he said. ‘A truly unusual place, a village with three Norman castles and only one of them built in stone. Isn’t that where you meant?’

  ‘Why would one village have three castles?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rupert. ‘No one does. But that just happens to be where we’re going next when we’ve finished here, me and these guys.’ He looked across to where his students were sitting in a row. ‘It’s not so far. The other side of Wincanton. It’s like nowhere else I know and it really is just like your stories said. Three Norman castles, all huddled next to each other round the end of a ridge, no more than a mile apart, right on each other’s doorstep. It’s the strangest place.’

  Dozer’s voice growled out of the darkness. ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Penselwood,’ said Rupert, making the first two syllables sound like ‘pencil’ then, with a different stress, ‘or maybe I should say it like they do – Pen Selwood,’ and Jo thrilled to his words without knowing why.

  CHAPTER 7

  Luke didn’t argue when the teacher suggested they put the bike in his car. His back was still aching, one of his elbows was bruised and stiffening, and he didn’t want to cycle home. For the first few miles they talked about the grenades but soon they ran out of knowledge, meaning and words. Mr Martin seemed both ill at ease and a bit too interested in him and Luke looked out of the window, trying to seem engrossed in the fields and the houses they passed as if he could project himself completely out of the car.

  In the end the teacher couldn’t keep it in any more. ‘That stuff about the vineyard, Luke. How did you know?’

  ‘I’m not sure, sir.’

  The teacher studied him for a moment. ‘It’s time off. Forget the sir. I’ve never taught you, have I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You just came to my History Club? Once, was it?’

  ‘Twice. I came on the field trip to Dunster Castle.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  The teacher clearly didn’t remember what had happened – the row with the other kids. He shrugged. ‘I feel I know you, that’s all. I mean more than just knowing your face from school assembly and so on. Can you remember anything else?’

  ‘No,’ he said, which was true in a way. Luke didn’t want to talk about it. The whole thing seemed best left behind, miles away and unreal.

  ‘Have you ever had anything like that before?’

  ‘How do you mean, like that?’

  ‘Well, odd thoughts. Stuff from the past, memories.’

  ‘No,’ said the boy and turned away deliberately, staring again out of the side window. As if the question had sparked them off, his mind filled with brief images of men with spades at Montacute, digging on that hill, and they were not today’s wispy amateurs but solid men of old. They were burying it . . . or were they digging it up? Of course there was a big hole there, he thought. It would have needed a big hole. Like recapturing a dream as daytime took over, he couldn’t quite capture what ‘it’ was. He leaned his head against the cold glass, watching the trees streaming by. They made him drowsy. Gradually, as the engine droned and the world tore past, he fell into a trance and a series of faces came to his mind’s eye – tiny faces but clearly formed, one after another.

  Girls’ faces.

  Each one hung there beyond the window glass, tipped a little to one side or the other. Each one was as clear as a photograph and utterly different from the last – fair, dark, elfin, apple-cheeked, blue, brown, green-eyed. Each one w
as utterly the same. The same girl lived behind the eyes.

  He had neglected to breathe and now took in a long gulp of air.

  ‘Are you all right?’ someone asked. He had forgotten Michael Martin, forgotten he was in a car, and had no clear idea how long they had been driving.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ he replied and saw the teacher’s eyebrows rise. As he said it, he knew it was not the way the boy Luke would have answered and it surprised him that he no longer felt quite like the boy Luke. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m fine,’ but the indrawn breath had turned around into a long sigh and left him heartsick. He turned back to the window and tried to see the faces again but there were road signs instead. They were on the A38, slowing for the turn-off. He looked up and saw the ridge rising and the thing that was in him, the thing that was pushing out the boy, rose with it.

  The teacher stopped the car. ‘I’m up that way,’ he said, pointing at a small lane leading up the slope, ‘but I can take you home if you want. Cucklington, you said?’

  The sign to Cucklington pointed south. ‘It’s only two miles,’ the boy replied. ‘I can bike it.’

  The teacher lifted the bicycle out of the car and drove away.

  The boy laid it on the grass and sat down, looking after the car as it disappeared between narrow banks. He had been up that way before, but only once. Five, maybe six years ago? Primary school – and he had friends then. The teacher had asked him about odd stuff, and if he had wanted to answer he would have said that day might have been the start of it.

  There had been three of them, always three – Zach and Ryan and Luke their leader, bursting through the woods up there on the ridge, yelling and darting, legs pumping on bikes they knew would fly if pedalled hard enough. They were ten years old and gravity held them lightly. The sun flashed green and blue in the broken roof of leaves as they swerved and leapt through a wild world beyond parental eyes, a first visit to the scene of older brothers’ boasts. They wanted to be heroes too.