Forget-Me-Not Child

by Anne Bennett

  ‘I agree,’ Mary said. ‘And it means that Matilda has to care for her own sister.’

  ‘And with anyone else I would feel sorry for them having to do that,’ Angela said. ‘But with those two horrible people I can’t help feeling it serves them right.’

  ‘Don’t blame you, girl,’ Mary said. ‘Cos I felt a bit the same. Anyway without Maitland’s I did get all the stuff I needed for the party in the end and Connie’s delight made it all worthwhile.’

  And Connie was in a fever of excitement and so were the four little girls she had invited from the Nursery. Two of the mothers worked making shells at the same place as Angela and Maggie, and Maggie popped in too and so it was a merry little party. And when Angela watched the children sing Happy Birthday to Connie she felt a surge of happiness and stored it all in her head and her heart to tell Barry in her next letter.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Both the spring and summer of 1915 were in the main warm and sunny and it was even warmer in the factory and although Angela like all the rest stripped down to her underwear under her boiler suit, after just a short time in the factory her face would be red and glistening and she would feel beads of sweat running down her back and by the time she had finished her shift her clothes were usually sticking to her.

  She knew she was luckier than many because sometimes she had the opportunity to get out of the factory and drive the lorries which was a lot more pleasant. But she was always grateful for the bowl of warm water Mary had ready for her at home as well so she could wash herself all over before she ate. She knew she owed Mary a lot for though she worked long hours, life would be much harder for her if she had to cook a meal when she got in every evening and somehow manage to shop and clean as well.

  The nice weather did mean though that almost every Sunday and sometimes Saturday afternoon too she could go somewhere nice with Connie. She valued the time spent with her a great deal as she saw so little of her generally.

  But the summer passed and by the time Christmas was approaching the summer was just a memory. She was driving more now which she thought far more interesting than making shells ad infinitum. She had tried to get Maggie to take a driving course but she said she was too scared and she tried to encourage her again one day as they travelled into work in mid December. ‘I’d crash into something,’ Maggie said.

  ‘’Course you wouldn’t,’ Angela said. ‘Why would you do that? You steer with the wheel and there is a brake if you feel you are too close and you can go as slow as you like to start with.’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘It’s never been something I’ve ever wanted to do.’

  Angela laughed. ‘Well I bet making shells wasn’t on your list of things to do either.’

  ‘Well no, ’course it wasn’t, but the money’s good.’

  ‘But this is an opportunity that we wouldn’t have any other time,’ Angela said. ‘This is a dreadful war, the casualty figures are scary and I wish Barry and Stan were not involved at all and I wish the country had not emptied itself of men, but it has and we couldn’t stop it. And because that has happened women have had the opportunity to do things we have never done before and driving to me was just one more thing. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would get behind the wheel of a truck and drive it to factories and distribution depots all over the place. I couldn’t pass up the chance and I’m glad I didn’t because I love it.’

  ‘I know you do,’ Maggie said. ‘But it really isn’t for me so stop bullying me about it.’

  Angela grinned. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You have got a point. I have been badgering you and it isn’t fair. If you really don’t want to learn to drive that should be your choice.’

  Maggie sighed with relief and to change the subject a little asked Angela if she’d finished the Christmas Boxes for Barry and Stan. ‘More or less,’ Angela said. ‘Still it will be a funny old Christmas with just Mammy and myself. If it wasn’t for Connie I wouldn’t be bothered putting up decorations or anything.’

  ‘Well it doesn’t give a person much heart when they just have the one day off.’

  ‘I know. Stingy lot,’ Angela said. ‘Mammy couldn’t believe we just had Christmas Day.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Maggie said. ‘I suppose what you have got to tell yourself is that fighting men don’t even get that and me and our Mom will be filling our own Christmas Box next year.’

  ‘Syd?’ Angela said for that was the name of Maggie’s eldest brother.

  Maggie nodded her head. ‘Only turned eighteen a few weeks ago. Mom’s cut up about it but there’s nothing to be done. He must go like the rest.’

  ‘Does he mind?’

  ‘I’ll say not. He can’t wait, silly fool,’ Maggie said. ‘He thinks it’s like some Boy Scouts’ Jamboree. He’s trying to hide it from Mom but I know our Syd.’

  ‘I suppose it’s better that he’s keen rather than the other way round when he has to go anyway,’ Angela said.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Maggie said. ‘They don’t hang about. Provided he passes his medical, he will be in before Christmas.’

  ‘That’s not that far away now,’ Angela said. ‘And then the turn of the year. I wonder what 1916 will bring, the end of the war perhaps?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Maggie said. ‘I stopped believing in fairy tales years ago.’

  In the Eastertide of 1916 there was an insurrection in Dublin when rebel forces known at the time as The Brotherhood took over the General Post Office and various other strategic places in Dublin. ‘I suppose they imagined with England fighting Germany the government had their hands too full to worry about them,’ Mary said.

  ‘Can’t see it myself. Can you?’ Angela asked.

  Mary shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘And I dread to think of England’s response to this. I don’t think it will achieve anything. I mean I’m angry like we all are, England promised us independence if we helped them in the war but since then they have done nothing about it. All those young men, 125,000 of them, joined up in all good faith and many have been badly injured or have not returned at all and England is still silent about the promise it made. Well to be honest I expected nothing else, in my heart of hearts, but violence is not the way to protest and it is affecting their own. It tells you in the paper about the ordinary Dubliners unable to walk the streets for fear of being shot at. In fact it says many shops have put up their shutters and ceased trading to try and prevent looting.’

  ‘Well soon there’ll be nothing to put in the shops,’ Angela said, ‘for they have hold of the railway station and they are letting nothing out.’

  ‘I know,’ Mary said. ‘And the poor people have had their cars and carts and all else purloined to form the barricade in a place called St Stephen’s Green. It’s supposed to be a beautiful place and they have dug trenches all through it.’

  ‘It can’t be let go on,’ Angela said. ‘Germany or no Germany, England won’t stand for this much longer.’

  And it didn’t for the next day a field gun was placed on the roof of the Sherbourne Hotel, which stood facing one corner of St Stephen’s Green, and began shelling and shooting the rebels and they fled to the Royal College of Surgeons. There was another rebel contingent set to guard Mountford Bridge, which was the bridge leading from the Kingstown Docks where British ships off-loaded 10,000 extra soldiers. Another field gun was installed in a place called Merrion Square and it routed those guarding the bridge, and on Wednesday of that week the gunship Helga sailed up the Liffey pounding those occupying Liberty Hall.

  Surrender was a foregone conclusion and it came on Saturday 29th April. The rebellion had lasted six days and left 450 dead and 2,000 injured. ‘It will take a sight longer than six days for Dublin and the Dubliners to get over this,’ Mary said grimly. ‘Dublin has been burnt, battered and bruised, there is little food to be had, people’s businesses have been looted and other lives destroyed with the loss of those cars and carts, and I feel sorry for the families of those men who have lost their means of making
a living, not to mention the maimed and the dead.’

  ‘Will they all be shot d’you think?’

  ‘I can’t see what other outcome there could be for whatever they choose to call themselves, the English will only have one word for them and that is traitors and they shoot traitors.’

  Mary was right. Three hundred people were arrested and one hundred and eighty of those were sent to England and held without trial, including a man called Roger Casement and another called Eamon de Valera who had his execution changed to a life sentence because he had an American passport. Over the next fortnight ninety people were condemned to death. Later it became known that fourteen leaders had been killed in the stone breaker’s yard in Kilmainham Jail, just days after the uprising.

  Upsetting though this news was, war news took precedence and also worry about their loved ones fighting a bloody war somewhere in France. Angela was delighted when she heard that the private soldier’s wages were raised from a shilling a day to two shillings. Barry said he was sending the extra seven shillings to her together with the five shillings he was already sending. Angela said she didn’t need it with her wages but he insisted.

  I know you to be no spendthrift, he wrote. Any money left put in the savings account.

  He had no need to write that really for Mary looked for bargains to make her good nutritious meals with, and with Connie having her dinner at the nursery and Angela having hers at the subsidized canteen, money went further anyway and any surplus went straight into the Post Office.

  Throughout the spring there had been talk of a new Front opening in France which might shorten the war. No one really knew a great deal but rumours were rife. The Front was going to stretch for fifteen miles to the north of the river Somme, and soon the river would give its name to the bloodiest battle in the war so far, the Battle of the Somme. The earth was chalk and so the trenches criss-crossing the area were white and crumbly.

  Some of the men assembled that early summer’s day were new recruits held back for this campaign to fight next to seasoned soldiers now battle hardened, all part of Kitchener’s New Army. As usual the British had been bombarding the enemy. It had been going on for a week and so the men were told opposition would be minimal.

  Unbeknownst to the British, the Germans, used to this pre-battle bombardment, had moved their lines back, digging deep down into the crumbly chalk to make shell-proof bunkers, so when the British bombardment was over and the British began to advance, expecting little opposition, the Germans crawled out of the bunkers ready to face the enemy. Certain of victory, the British Army invited the newsreels in for the first time.

  And so there were banks of reporters and cameramen everywhere and the newsreels rolled and captured the men leaving the trenches in waves, some not making it over the top as a bullet found its mark, and the soldier would jerk and fall back into the trench he had just left. Others were hit as they ran towards the coils of barbed wire. The cameras could not go further into No Man’s Land but the press could hear all right, the barking of the guns and the whine of shells, mixed with the screams and cries of men that went on and on.

  Towards evening, with the Germans eventually in retreat, quietness descended. One or two intrepid cameramen took their cameras from their tripods and, carrying them, slithered under the wire as they had seen the soldiers do, though some hadn’t made it and were impaled on the wire, and then they were through and stood and surveyed No Man’s Land, shocked to the core. So the cameras recorded the ground littered with bodies and parts and pieces of bodies and the men with half a skull or limbs missing often lying in a pool of their lifeblood which was soaking into the chalky soil. Some were still alive, twitching or lying still with bleak deadened eyes in too much pain to even cry.

  The orderlies were using the cover of the gathering dusk to move the bodies and the cameramen helped them with tears in their own eyes. And later when they found out it was estimated that 2,000 men died in the first hour of the conflict they weren’t surprised. On that first day alone there were 60,000 casualties. They knew that many in England would scarcely believe that things were as bad as they had seen for themselves because the soldiers’ letters were censored and the reporters and cameramen all thought it was about time the general public knew the truth, because what they had witnessed was more like a massacre than a battle.

  And so no punches were pulled when the newsreel was published and it was shown at cinemas. Angela never visited the cinema, but many of her workmates had been and so had seen the newsreel and shared the full horror of it with the rest of them the next day. The girls listened in horrified silence as they spoke about the absolute slaughter of British soldiers that day and the words they spoke caused the blood to run like ice in Angela’s veins. She could scarcely believe what they were hearing and Maggie too was shocked to the core and before they caught the tram home that night, they bought a selection of papers each and Angela noted that the fiasco of the Somme was on the front page of every one.

  Later, with Connie safely tucked up in bed, she studied them with Mary that night. There was no guarantee that Barry or Stan were anywhere near the Somme that day and yet she felt in her bones that they had been. 60,000 casualty in 24 hours, the numbers revererated in her head and the harrowing pictures showing the scenes captured on the cameras hours after the virtual bloodbath she knew would haunt her forever.

  Before that day while everyone at home knew war wasn’t a great experience and men were maimed and killed and that was awful and dreadful, it was the newsreels and the newspaper articles that brought what had happened in the Battle of the Somme into into their own living rooms.

  ‘My God,’ Angela said. ‘The death toll’s colossal.’

  Mary sighed. ‘I know, they must have just been mown down. Some never even got out of the trenches and others were impaled on the barbed wire as they reached No Man’s Land.’

  ‘And how the injured suffered,’ Angela said with feeling. ‘They had lost limbs … oh many had perfectly dreadful injuries and the battle was so fierce they had to wait all day in the hot sun to be tended.’

  She was affected even by the grainy pictures from the newspaper, they were quite graphic enough, capturing the savagery of it so well. She was glad that they were just black and white and didn’t think she could bear to see the film. ‘And Barry could be part of this,’ Angela said. ‘And Stan could.’

  ‘We would have heard if anything had happened to them,’ Mary said. ‘They would send a telegram.’

  Angela knew that that was how many learned the bad news of their loved ones, but thought it might take some time to work out just who was killed, or badly injured and send the relevant telegrams, especially as the Battle of the Somme was still going on, and the loss of life was still high though it was not as high as on that first day.

  However Angela saw no purpose in telling Mary her inner thoughts, time enough for her to worry when there was something to worry about and so she contented herself by saying, ‘The point is, Mammy, every man killed was someone’s father or son, husband, sweetheart or brother and they will all be missed and I’m thinking there will be many grieving people throughout the land just now.’

  Mary sighed. ‘I know and I know too I’m being selfish, but it isn’t totally wrong to be glad that your lad is still living even though another person’s might be dead, is it?’

  Angela gave Mary’s shoulder a squeeze as she said, ‘No of course it isn’t and you haven’t a selfish bone in your body.’ And then she added, ‘This was supposed to shorten the war, according to the Government. Huh! If it means carnage on this scale I would say it’s too high a price to pay.’

  Angela waited daily for the buff telegram to be delivered to their door. It affected her nerves and disturbed her sleep but she could do nothing about it. The only good thing was that after such a tremendous loss of life, at a stroke many areas in cities, as well as small towns and villages, had lost all their young men. The Pals Regiment idea was dropped.

  Barr
y used to write once a week, but when he had been in the army a while sometimes a fortnight would pass and then two or three letters would arrive together. But when it had been over three weeks since a letter from Barry came through the door, Angela was coming to terms with the fact that Barry was not ever coming home again. So when a letter was waiting for her as she came home from work one evening in early August and it was in a hand she didn’t recognize, she assumed it was from some Department of the War Office to formally announce Barry’s death and with a heavy heart she opened the envelope and withdrew the letter and then cried out with joy.

  Mary had had her head down, trying to prepare herself for the bad news she was sure the letter contained and now her head shot up and she noted the light shining in Angela’s face, and the tears glistening in her eyes and she cried, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Barry.’

  ‘Barry,’ repeated Mary incredulously. ‘He isn’t dead?’

  Angela knew that despite Mary saying they would hear officially if anything happened to Barry, she had begun to lose heart that she would ever see her son again.

  Angela threw down the letter and caught Mary’s hands up in her own and said, ‘No, he’s not dead, but very much alive. He has been injured though and still can’t write because his arms are in plaster and so a VAD is writing this on his behalf.’

  Barry had found that he was unable to express himself as he normally would when telling a third party rather than committing the words to paper himself, which meant he was unable to say many things due to embarrassment. He also had no intention of telling Angela of the fever that nearly killed him, nor of the very real fear that he might lose his arm, peppered as it was with shrapnel. Angela didn’t have to know, but it meant that he had very little he could tell her as he was not allowed to mention that hell-hole at the Somme either.

  But Angela didn’t care how brief the stiff little missive was because it told her all that she needed to know and that her Barry was alive and as well as could be expected when fighting a war. ‘He did catch sight of Stan too,’ Angela said to Mary scanning the letter again. ‘He calls him just S but that’s who he means, but he said he was too far away to speak or anything and he doesn’t know what happened to him afterwards. Who would be informed if anything happened to Stan?’ Angela asked.