by Sadie Jones
We will remember them.’
‘We will remember them,’ answered the voices of the people.
After a moment the church bells pealed the hour. As the last bell faded the silence began.
The winter air of England was silent all around and between the villages, stretching high up into the grey sky and over the hills, linking them, joining.
A nervous boy of perhaps fourteen stepped forward. He held the bugle in pink cold fingers. He raised it, drew a breath, and Hal saw again the white road with the young boy on it, and his own hand holding the gun to his head.
The Last Post sounded. The first two notes were like a blade through the air, and breaths were taken around him. The reaching sound went on to its last thin note, then died.
The gathered people stirred themselves to walk to the church. They parted for the vicar and then began to follow him. Clara looked up at Hal. He nodded to her, reassuring her – about what, he didn’t know – but then let go of her hand and walked quickly away from the others, back, along the road towards the house, leaving the black crowd behind him. He heard Lottie say, ‘Mummy!’ once, imperiously, and knew, gratefully, that Clara could not follow him.
His quick steps sounded hard on the gritty pavement. The white gate swung wide when he pushed it and banged back against its metal catch behind him. The front door was unlocked.
He went into the hall, fast, on into the drawing room, the fire was burning brightly behind the guard, paintings, photographs surrounded him, the gleaming battered piano, vases of flowers, silver and the smell of lunch that filled the empty warm house. He went back into the hall – feet on the worn rug – back, through the dining room, table set with empty places, into the stone-flagged passage past the kitchen door, past the boots and the place where the shotgun was kept in the high locked cupboard, amongst the tins and garden poisons, out of the back door, onto the terrace.
He went quickly up the garden, past the borders with the cut ends of rose bushes and tangled wet shrubs, over the sinking grass to the gate. There was the pasture beyond it and the path cut through the grass, but he turned away from it, because he could not leave again, because there was nowhere to go to.
He was blinded. It was as if the universe turned round him blackly and he, within it, earthbound and empty too.
He closed his eyes.
‘God,’ he said.
Quiet. Silence. Darkness.
‘God,’ he said again.
Then, with his eyes shut, he heard a small whispering sound. It was a still, complicated sound. His mind was alert to it, and only it, immediately. He opened his eyes.
Ahead of him was a small tree. It was perhaps twenty feet high. It was a very young oak. The trunk was soft grey-brown like the hide of a young deer or rabbit.
And, just then, the breeze moved around him. He thought it must be a breeze – at least – he had been touched. He saw that the dry leaves that still hung from tiny twigs were moving together and making the whispering sound he had heard. The leaves trembled, each one, as their outlines grew sharper. He looked at the shivering leaves and at the clarity of their edges. The oak leaf, embroidered in gold, dreamed of, promised to, betrayed and deserted. Here was not one, but many, not just the leaf but the whole tree, and it seemed to brighten as he looked. He thought the sun must have come out but the fine wetness still moved in the air.
He saw that there were, amongst the twigs and clinging leaves, the tiny, almost invisible beginnings of new leaves – not leaves exactly, but the suggestion of them – and next to those, acorns, very small and fresh looking.
He looked at the lines and shapes of the bark where the branches grew, at the leaves and the clean trunk. He stood in the damp winter garden with the small oak tree and it might have been Eden.
He was glad that they were singing and wouldn’t notice him coming in. The flagstones of the path were wet beneath his feet. The door was slightly open and as he pushed it wider and stepped into the church he saw his family immediately. Clara lifted her chin and turned towards him. Her relief and anxiety made him impatient to get to her. He wanted to explain to her; he didn’t think he could. The church was full and loud. He had to go to the aisle, past some flowers on a stand, and then push by a row of people, apologising, not noticing them, until he was beside her, or nearly – the twins were between them. Too young for singing, they were facing one another and pressing their hands together in pleasurable boredom at some vague version of pat-a-cake. They glanced up at him and then continued. Hal had stepped into the half-space made by the people next to them, and stood a little sideways looking at Clara. The heavy organ and uneven voices insulated them. He could not hold her hand; there was a row behind, people were less than a foot away, standing, singing in the narrow pews. He remembered he had been shamed by the presence of these people – remembered it but let it fall away from him. The damp coats and dark wood, gleaming, the cool rising arches of the vaulted ceiling, the music and strong, restrained communion, all were known to him, and loved: he was at home.
Clara put her hymn book across the gap between them awkwardly and he, grateful for the convention, shared the holding of it. Meg, bored with standing, leaned back against his knee, thoughtlessly confident of him, and Hal looked into Clara’s face.
They examined one another and there was no barrier, no sea, no act committed, not so much as a pane of glass between them; not even air, it felt to him. He travelled her face slowly and, returning to her eyes, saw that she was smiling at him.
Author’s Note
Small Wars is a fiction. With the greatest of respect for history and those people who experienced life in Cyprus and England in the 1950s, I have occasionally amalgamated, compressed or otherwise manipulated places and events to suit my story. I should like to make clear, too, that all the characters in Small Wars – with the obvious exceptions of well-known historical figures – are entirely fictional.
Acknowledgements
For Small Wars:
I am grateful to the many people who gave of their time and knowledge during the writing of the book.
I should like to thank the website britains-smallwars.com, which not only partly inspired the title, but also gave me invaluable and detailed information, military, political and personal, in the accounts of soldiers who served in Cyprus and elsewhere. They are owed an enormous debt of gratitude.
In the course of my research, these books were helpful to me: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire by Piers Brendon; Time at War by Nicholas Mosley; Hot War, Cold War by Colin McInnes; Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell; Instruments of War by Peter R. Cullis; ‘Terrible Hard’, Says Alice by Christopher Wood; Murder, Mutiny and the Military by Gerry R. Rubin; The Call-Up: A History of National Service by Tom Hickman; Unreasonable Behaviour by Don McCullin; British Infantry Uniforms Since 1660 by Michael Barthorp and Pierre Turner.
My thanks also go to the staff at the British Library; RMA Sandhurst; the Imperial War Museum; Bulford Camp, Wiltshire; Episkopi Garrison, Cyprus; and to Dr Ian Palmer. Thanks to Alexander Baring, and the other serving soldiers with whom I spoke and had email correspondence. They were without exception kind, helpful and informative.
Many thanks to Christopher Wood, for his help and interest. I am also extremely grateful to David Patterson for his memories of Cyprus during his National Service, his wonderful diaries and his generosity in sharing both. Thanks to Rebecca Harris and Anna Parker, and to Julia Gregson for her Cyprus memories. Many thanks also go to Martin Bradley, and to Charlie Hopkinson, whose patience and rigour in answering my questions made an enormous contribution during the writing.
I would particularly like to thank Clara Farmer for her insight and dedication; she has been a true friend to the book. Also, many thanks to Sue Amaradivakara. I am proud to have Small Wars published by Chatto & Windus, and grateful to everybody there; it could not be in better hands.
Thanks also to Terry Karten at HarperCollins, New York.
Thanks to my age
nt and friend, Caroline Wood, for her energy, consistency and integrity.
For myself:
To Tim, Daisy, Tabitha and Fred Boyd; Evan, Joanna and Melissa Jones; and my good friends – my love and gratitude.
Sadie Jones,
London, April 2009
About the Author
SADIE JONES’s first novel, The Outcast, was published to wide critical acclaim and won the Costa First Novel Award in Great Britain. It was also a finalist for the prestigious Orange Prize, as well as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Jones lives in London.
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Also by Sadie Jones
The Outcast
Credits
Map by Reginald Piggott
Jacket photography: woman © Roger-Viollet/TopFoto; background montage © Hulton-Deutsch/Corbis and Getty Images
Jacket design by Christine Van Bree
Copyright
Extract from “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon. The Society of Authors is the literary representative of the Estate of Laurence Binyon.
SMALL WARS. Copyright © 2010 by Sadie Jones. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Hyperion e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
EPub Edition © December 2009 ISBN: 978-0-06-196632-3
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