‘Of course it was.’
‘Well, sorry anyway. It was ungentlemanly.’
She snorted out through her nose and began to clear away his tray of food.
‘You must think me very stupid,’ he said.
She stood upright, leaving his tray where it was. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. So far in this conversation you’ve called yourself a brute, ungentlemanly and now stupid. In the past couple of days, you’ve said sorry because you had dressings that needed changing. You’ve apologised for causing trouble – by which I assume you meant being honourably wounded in the service of your country. And when I tried to pay you the compliment of noticing your Military Cross you told me that you hadn’t earned it. So far, Captain Montague, I’m beginning to conclude that you’re a great nincompoop.’
He smiled. ‘Sorry.’
‘Sorry again? What is it this time?’
‘Very well then, not sorry … Miss Dunlop, may we start again? I’m Captain Alan Montague and I’m perfectly delighted to make your acquaintance.’
She bobbed in an exquisite curtsy and offered him her hand. ‘Charlotte Dunlop,’ she said. ‘Do call me Lottie.’
For six weeks, Alan recovered. At first he was embarrassed that he should be cared for so intimately by a friend and guest of his parents. Then, later, as he became well enough to be pushed round the hospital in a wheelchair, he began to understand what Lottie’s day-to-day job involved. The wing of the hospital in which she worked dealt with some of the worst cases coming over from France. She handled men who had lost both legs, who had been blinded or deafened, men whose lungs had been three-quarters destroyed by gas, who coughed black blood each time they tried to breathe too deeply. Compared with the things Lottie saw each and every day, Alan’s personal embarrassment at being bathed seemed so trivial.
They became friends.
At the end of her daily duties, Lottie came to find Alan, bringing two steaming great mugs of tea and a slice of cake from home. He learned how she had been on holiday in France when the war broke out. She’d extended her stay, ‘not wanting to travel back while the fighting was still going on – my goodness, how strange it feels to remember that now’. Staying in a hotel at Boulogne, she’d encountered some of the wounded men of the original Expeditionary Force and stayed to help. She’d been appalled by what she’d seen to begin with – ‘I must have been a very sheltered little girl, I’m afraid. I hadn’t imagined … I hadn’t even imagined what it could have been like’ – but came to find something like a vocation in her bloodstained trade. ‘I came back from France for Mummy and Daddy’s sake, but I insisted on at least coming here –’ she meant the Centre for the Very Seriously Wounded – ‘as I couldn’t stand to have become one of those ghastly debs who take a few temperatures and change a few dressings, then think they’ve earned themselves a letter of thanks from the King.’
And he, in return, told her all about himself. He found he was able to speak to her about the fighting with something approaching candour. After all, for every horror he had seen, she had heard of things every bit as bad. She had even, he reflected, witnessed more deaths at close quarters, since perhaps one-third of the men who passed through her hands were too badly injured to survive and her job kept her by their sides until the bitter end.
‘When you were concussed, you used to moan a lot in your sleep,’ she said. ‘You called out for mother – everyone does,’ she added quickly, ‘everyone – but also for Tom. That would be Tom Creeley, I suppose? The boy you grew up with.’
‘Yes, though that doesn’t quite say it. Tom was my twin. I couldn’t have been closer to him if he’d been my flesh and blood. For a few days after his death, I quite lost my head. I almost willed myself to die.’
She nodded. ‘That’s quite common, actually. It is a phase. It does pass.’
‘It has passed, I think. I miss Tom every moment – does that sound absurd? It’s true, though – but I don’t feel that my life has to end because of it. Actually, I’m getting rather keen on life.’
She smiled at him. Her smile seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world.
‘Me too, my dear captain. Me too.’
46
The escape attempt was a complete success and a total failure.
One morning in May 1917, Tom found an opportunity to throw a handful of grit into the engine that drove the soda factory’s principal conveyor belt. The machinery choked and died. Sabotage was instantly suspected, and prisoners were informed that working hours would be extended until dusk that night. It was what Tom had wanted.
That evening, as he and Mitch Norgaard passed a wood on their way home, they broke from the column of prisoners and ran for their lives into the sheltering trees. Some shots rang out. Still they ran.
Norgaard was hit once in the leg. He could have stopped. Tom would have stopped there with him. But the thought of further captivity was too much for the noble-hearted American. ‘Freedom!’ he shouted. ‘Freedom!’ He ran on and Tom ran with him.
Into disaster.
As appalling luck would have it, a group of German guards on their way home from camp was passing through the woods. Tom and Norgaard ran almost into them. A shot cracked out. Norgaard was hit again and fell dead. The rifles swung around to Tom.
He thought seriously about running on. He thought about choosing death by gunfire over death by starvation. He thought about it, but decided against. He raised his hands, and – wearily, wearily – plodded towards the guns.
This was the success: that Mitch Norgaard would never know captivity again.
Here was the failure: that Tom would, as likely as not, never know anything else.
Tom’s punishment was lenient: one month in solitary confinement on half-rations. When, at the end of the month, he was brought before the camp commandant, his legs were thin, his arms scrawny, his belly jammed tight with hunger. He had lived almost a year in prison. He supposed he would die there.
The commandant frowned.
‘No punishments. Satisfactory work record. Not so sick as many. Why try to escape? You were lucky not to be shot.’ The commandant spoke German, a little quicker than Tom could easily understand.
‘Lucky? Why lucky?’ said Tom. He was dizzy from long confinement, lack of daylight, and the delirium of near-starvation. The German word for stomach shoved its way into his mind. ‘Magen. Mein Magen.’
The commandant snorted, then turned to one of the Wachposten at his side in order to issue a series of rapid instructions. Then, using French, he spoke to Tom. ‘I have changed your work detail. We need more help on the farms. You will be ready at five o’clock, to be on the farm by six thirty. You will give me your word of honour that you will not attempt to escape again. Understand?’
Tom understood – and on that day Tom’s war ended, or at least the brutal uncertainty over living or dying.
As the commandant had known, it was easy for any man working on a farm to keep himself alive. If Tom sowed barley, he ate a handful of the grain. When he split turnips for the sheep, he kept a moon-shaped slice for himself. When he carried the tubs of porridge to the pigs and calves, he slurped up some of the mixture from the bottom, where the oats were thickest. In autumn, at harvest time, he chomped on fresh apples, concealed some of the waxy potatoes in his tunic, had a pocket of wheat bulging in his trousers.
For the first time since being taken prisoner, Tom remembered what it was like to be happy.
To be happy and to survive.
47
Alan too survived the war.
When his health returned, he went back to France. But not to the front line. Not to the fighting. With a rare flickering of intelligence, the War Office had the sense to transfer Alan to an outfit known as the Military Fuels Procurement Office in Paris.
Alan had had very little idea of what was involved until he got there and met his superior, a cheerful lieutenant colonel with a quick smile and a booming laugh.
‘Secret of success,’ said the lieutenant colo
nel. ‘Fritz thought he was going to win this war because his railways were better. We know we’re going to win, because our motor transport is better. Our lads came to France with just eighty vehicles to call their own. By the end of next year, we’ll have two hundred thousand, between us and the Frogs. That’s not to mention hundreds of tanks, thousands of aircraft, plus whatever the Yanks bring with ’em. But you know the best part about it all? It’s this. There’s no point Fritz trying to build lorries to keep up with us, because he’s got no oil to put in ’em. That’s our job here. Getting the fuel to the boys who need it. If we get it right, we’ll win the war.’
The lieutenant colonel was right. The work was important, even critical. And as every month went by, he was proved ever more correct. Increasingly, the Allies had a mobility that their enemy couldn’t match. Mobility and, with new American troops arriving by the week, manpower. And so Alan passed the rest of the war. He was harassed, overworked, hopelessly busy – but safe. Blissfully, gloriously, wonderfully safe.
As far as he could be without either Tom or Lottie, he was happy.
For weeks before the longed-for peace had finally arrived, Tom’s prison camp swirled with rumour and counterrumour. Down on the farm where he worked, only the essential jobs were done, everything else neglected. For the first time, Tom learned about the defeat of Austria-Hungary, the surrender of the Turks, the mutinies at Kiel dockyard.
At the end of that day, when it was time to return to camp, Tom remained seated. ‘I’ll stay here,’ he said. ‘Why not?’
It was strictly against regulations. The Wachposten – whose rifles were leaning placidly in the corner of the room, with ammunition clips hung on a peg to stop the cats from getting at them – looked at the farmer, who looked back at them and shrugged. If the war was ending, what did they care? What did anyone care?
And one wonderful day, 11 November 1918, peace was declared.
Up and down the Western Front, men dropped their guns and stared at each other with something like bliss. A corporal from Alan’s former platoon, who’d survived four years of war without a scratch, dropped all his equipment on the ground and climbed out of the trench. He stood up. The chilly November air snaked around him, but no bullets, no shells. He removed his helmet and threw it high into the air. ‘You can push off now, Kameraden,’ he shouted across to the German lines. ‘We can all bugger off home.’
Down in the trench, his astonished comrades cheered.
PART FOUR
’Tis very strange but I declare
The world seems half insane,
The new disease as all will swear
Is Oil upon the Brain.
I saw a man whose garments bore
The marks of much free soil
And yet he cared not what he wore:
Beneath the stains was OIL.
from ‘Petroleum, Petroleum’
by O.I.L. Wells
48
Four miles from Whitcombe. Candles glimmered from cottage windows. There was a smell of wet leaves, woodsmoke, the sweet strong odour of cattle.
The date was 14 December 1918, thirty-three days after Armistice Day. Tom had walked and hitchhiked to the Dutch port of Rotterdam. He’d caught a lift on a steamer and stepped off the dock in Southampton, a free man with nowhere to go but home.
His pace quickened. He felt a sudden overpowering urge to see his father again; to hear his voice, slow in speech, but full of warmth. Whatever lies were told up at the big house, Jack Creeley would never turn away his one and only son.
Tom walked faster, till he was almost running. Arriving undetected at his father’s cottage, Tom tapped on the door and swung it open. But there, instead of Jack’s sturdy figure, a stranger was seated at the fire: an old man, white-haired. The stranger turned in his chair and stared.
‘Who’s that? Who’s that there? Come in, lad, I can’t see your face.’
‘My father? Is he … ? Where’s my father?’
‘Creeley, by God! Tom Creeley! And we thought you dead!’
Now Tom recognised the stranger. It was old Bertie Johnson, owner of a covered wagon, and the village carrier back when Tom was a youngster.
‘No, Bertie, I’m alive all right. Where’s my pa? He’s moved house, has he? Not head gardener, is he?’
The head gardener had the grandest cottage of the little row of four. It had long been Jack’s aspiration to possess it one day.
‘Moved house, Tom, in a manner of speaking. He’s with Our Lord now, God rest his soul.’
‘Dead? My father’s dead?’ The news was unbelievable. Tom crashed down on the rush-bottomed seat by the table. In all his time as a prisoner, he had been through seemingly every possible permutation of how matters might stand at home. He had imagined anger, love, forgiveness, hostility, even that long-postponed court martial. But he. had never once imagined this.
For a few minutes he sat in devastated silence, too shocked even to cry. Old man Johnson poked around in a cupboard and brought out bread, a dish of pork dripping, a bowl of apples and nuts. His movements were silent and respectful.
‘How?’ said Tom at last. ‘What happened? I can’t believe …’
Johnson sat down beside Tom, his hands on the table. At rest, they still held the shape of invisible reins, as though he were guiding his horses through the night.
‘It was the flu, lad. As if the war wasn’t bad enough, God had to send the flu as well. It took your pa, Jonah Hinton from the Tirrold Farm cottages, that pretty Jenny Manders, old Maggie Manders’ girl, not to mention …’
Johnson recited the names of the dead. Tom knew that the flu epidemic had been terrible, but the list of names beggared belief.
‘I can’t believe it. My father! Of all people!’
‘He didn’t suffer,’ said the old man gently. ‘One week, he was digging over the kitchen garden. The next week he was up at the churchyard beneath the ground … But you’re right, lad. It wasn’t the flu that did for him, it was the grieving.’
‘He believed me dead?’
‘So did we all, so did we all.’
‘I wrote to him.’
‘You were captured?’
‘Yes.’
‘In prison?’
‘Yes.’
‘These things go astray, I suppose.’
‘I wrote not once, but twice. The other men got answers.’
And food, Tom might have added. And a chance of survival.
‘He was no great hand at letters, your pa, but he’d never have just left you there, not knowing. He believed you dead, lad, I swear it.’
Bertie Johnson fell silent. With a flash of insight, Tom remembered that the village postman usually left letters for the estate workers at the lodge at the park gates. If the Montagues had decided Tom was better off dead, then nothing could have been simpler than to intercept the letters and destroy them. No wonder Jack Creeley believed he’d lost his only son.
For a long time, Tom stared into the fire, trying to make sense of things. But his loss was too great. He felt nothing but shock. He staggered heavily to his feet.
‘Bertie, I’m off. And look, just one thing. Promise me that you’ll tell no one, all right? Nobody. I don’t want anyone to know I’ve been. Let them think I’m dead. There’s no one here any more. No one for me. Promise me, Bertie.’
Bertie was speaking again, but Tom couldn’t even face the effort of making sense of his words. There was bread and dripping still on the table. Tom tore the bread in two and dunked his half into the bowl of dripping. It would be his supper tonight. He put an apple in his pocket. ‘Tell nobody. Promise me.’
The old man nodded. If he had an expression on his face, Tom didn’t know what it said.
‘Promise me, Bertie.’
‘I promise.’
Tom left. He set out on the open road, heading north.
49
The village green was sown with crosses: low oak crosses, each one decked with flowers from Pamela’s hothouse. In time, of co
urse, there would be a memorial in stone. A memorial to the bright-faced Whitcombe lads who had never come home. But every village in England wanted such a memorial now and the stone-cutters had more work than they could handle.
The church service concluded. The mourners mingled and dispersed. The crosses sat out in a light December rain. Thirteen crosses. And one of them – the one with more flowers than any other – was marked ‘Lieut. Thomas Creeley, MC, 1893–1916’.
After a sombre lunch had passed in quiet remembrance, Sir Adam called Alan to his study.
‘Listen, my boy, I have some good news for you.’ Sir Adam drew some papers from a desk drawer and pushed them across to his son. ‘The good news is that I’ve arranged for the oil concession to be put into your name. Just sign here and the thing’s done. And, by golly, how you’ve earned it.’
Alan signed, with a feeling of quiet joy. The concession. More than any wooden cross or any carving in stone, the concession would be Tom’s best memorial. Of course, the odds were heavily stacked against success. But Tom’s spirit in heaven wouldn’t mind failure. What mattered would be that Alan gave it his best go, that he did the very best he could. And Alan would need to call upon everything he’d ever learned from Tom. Daring, passion, stubbornness, charm, brilliance.
‘Thank you, Father. I can’t tell you how much this means.’
‘Then it’s lucky you don’t have to, my boy. I’d have liked to give you a little money as well. But to be perfectly blunt, I can’t do it. The war’s done my finances no good – no good at all. You’ll have your allowance, of course, but I’ve nothing else to give you. Not without digging into Guy’s share of the estate, anyway. I’ve spoken to him about it and he’s declined. I’m not sure he’s been exactly generous, but I’m afraid he’s within his rights.’
‘Of course. I understand.’
‘So I can give you the concession, but as for money to drill there … I’m afraid I can offer you nothing.’
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