‘Thank you.’ Of course, he didn’t. I suppose he had Miss Lovell to send him news now, or Miss Wainwright, or any one of a hundred other ladylike girls who could write a much more elegant letter than me. Than I.
‘Grace, is something the matter? You look very preoccupied. What is it?’
I should never have confided in Philip but, feeling the way I did then, it was impossible to resist. The whole story came spilling out. I told him what had happened to Tom, and the fact that Colonel Vye had gone out to France to try and help him, and even that my mother didn’t want anyone else to hear of it.
‘It’s as though she’s ashamed of him. Her own son!’
‘Now come on, that’s a little harsh. You can see why she wouldn’t want people to talk. Do you think she loves him any less than you do?’
I had to admit that I didn’t.
‘Everybody deals with these things in their own way. Perhaps she just doesn’t like asking anyone for help. And yet Uncle Rory is exactly the right person.’
‘He’s certainly been good to us.’
‘Yes, I’m sure he would be. He’s always been keen on fair play.’ Philip sighed. ‘I’m so sorry, Grace - you must be worried to death about Tom. For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine him ever letting anyone down if he could possibly help it. We used to get into twenty kinds of trouble when we were young and he always took the blame for me. I’ve never had a truer friend, before or since.’
I nodded, knowing the tears weren’t far away, and stood up. ‘I’d better be getting back. I hope everything goes all right for you in France.’
‘Thank you. I hope things don’t turn out too badly for your brother.’
I couldn’t think what to do next and neither could he, I suppose, because we ended up shaking hands. Then I walked down the hill; quieter now, but somehow even sadder.
Yet had I but known it, this torture of waiting had only one more night to run. The next morning, I came into the harness-room to find my father staring at a telegram on the table in front of him.
‘I’ve been looking at this thing for ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Will you open it, Grace?’
Fifteen
I shall never look on warfare either as fine or sporting again. It reduces men to shivering beasts: there isn’t a man who can stand shell-fire of the modern kind without getting the blues.
From a letter written by Lieutenant Gavin Greenwell from the Somme, August 1916
‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ my mother said. ‘I told you this was our affair and nobody else’s. Why didn’t you listen to me instead of running off to Colonel Vye? Why does he have to go meddling in our private family business?’
‘But didn’t you see this?’ I shook the telegram in front of her face. ‘Tom’s been acquitted! Surely nothing else matters except for that? Colonel Vye saved his life!’
‘We don’t know if it was that man’s doing. We don’t even know if he spoke up at his trial, this court-martial, or whatever it’s called. Tom would probably have got off anyway and the Colonel need never have stuck his oar in. Trust him to try and claim the credit.’
Why did she have to be so stubborn and sour? Honestly, I could have shaken her till her teeth rattled. When Da and I had read the telegram from Colonel Vye, we’d thrown it up in the air and danced a jig together around the table, crying and laughing at the same time. Tom had been found innocent of the charge and, what was more, he was coming home! He’d been given a week’s leave and the Colonel was bringing him back to us. Yet to look at Ma’s scowling, suspicious face, you’d have thought he’d personally locked my brother up and thrown away the key.
‘Colonel Vye went to France especially for us,’ I said, deliberately slowly. ‘He put himself to a great deal of trouble, not to mention danger, and even if he had nothing to do with Tom’s trial - which I don’t believe for one minute - we should thank him for that.’
‘I’m not thanking him for anything. Don’t you remember what I said, you naughty, disobedient girl? He was the last person you should have told.’
‘He was the only person who could have helped us! Who else has friends in the army, or knows how to find their way around the Front? Just tell me, Ma - why do you hate Colonel Vye so much? What harm has he ever done to you?’
It was a question I’d asked myself from time to time in the past, but never more urgently than now. And then suddenly the answer came to me. Perhaps I read it in my mother’s eyes. Something she had said weeks ago suddenly echoed in my head, ‘… fond of a young gentleman, one of the gentry’. At last I understood.
‘It’s your friend, isn’t it? What was her name? Iris, that’s it. The girl who had a baby and died in the workhouse.’ Of course! Why hadn’t I realised before? ‘Colonel Vye was the child’s father, wasn’t he?’
Ma didn’t need to speak; I knew from her face that I’d hit on the truth. ‘Oh, heavens,’ I said, ‘that was a long time ago. Hasn’t he made up for it now?’
‘You can never make up for wickedness like that.’ She glared at me for even daring to suggest such a thing. ‘If you’d seen the state she was in, her poor heart broken and left to die alone in that awful place, while Rory Vye went on his own sweet way as though he hadn’t a care in the world … Well, you’d hate him too, just as much as I do.’
‘For Tom’s sake, though, can’t you even thank him for what he’s done to help us?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘The words would probably stick in my throat, to be honest. I can’t look at him without thinking of Iris. Let’s see what Tom has to say, eh?’ She grasped my hand. ‘Now do you understand why I don’t want you anywhere near a young man from that family? If the same thing should happen to you, it would kill me.’
‘Philip’s not like that.’
‘You don’t know what he’s like. You might think you do but Iris probably thought she knew Master Rory, too, and look what happened to her. That boy’s trouble, Grace. Leave him well alone.’
Ma had no need to worry about Philip, because he’d be off to France before long, and anyway, all I could think about was Tom. Just to see him again, and talk to him! We could make everything all right, I was sure of it, once he was safe home. There was no way of knowing exactly when he’d be arriving, so Ma went home at dinner time the next day to wait. I ran down to the gate lodge early that evening, only to discover that my brother was back, but fast asleep upstairs.
‘How is he?’ I asked my mother. ‘Did he tell you what happened?’
‘Not really. He seems very quiet.’ The sink was full of wet clothes, which she went back to pounding against a washboard. ‘Ugh! You should have seen the state of this uniform - it was crawling with lice. I’ve had to boil it and burn his underclothes; they’d have fallen apart in the wash.’
‘But is he all right?’ I persisted. ‘Can I put my head round the bedroom door?’
‘Leave him in peace for the minute. He needs some time to himself.’
So I had to curb my impatience until the next morning. I found Tom sitting on his own in the front room, staring into space. ‘Why, hello, Grace,’ he said, looking faintly puzzled at the sight of me. He didn’t make a move to get up.
I kissed him, and knelt by the chair. ‘Tom! How are you? We’ve been so worried!’
‘Oh, there’s no need to worry about me. I’m all right. Right as rain.’
Of course he wasn’t - anyone could see that. He’d had a wash and a shave, and dressed himself in a clean shirt and trousers, but he seemed completely at a loss as to what he was meant to do next. All the spirit that made him Tom seemed to have gone, and only the empty husk of a man with his face and body left behind. It was dreadful. I found myself yattering about nothing in particular - how wonderful it was to have him home, and all the things we could do over the next few days, and even that he’d be here for my birthday, which happened to be coming up - while all the time he gazed at me with that bemused expression, as if he couldn’t quite remember who I was. After a little wh
ile, Ma came in.
‘That’s enough for now, Grace,’ she said. ‘You can come back this evening and we’ll all have supper at home.’
‘Oh, Ma,’ I whispered in the kitchen, ‘what’s happened to him?’
‘Give him time,’ she said, but I could see she was just as worried. There wasn’t a great deal of time left, for one thing. How could Tom go back to France in this state? We didn’t even know for sure whether he’d be in the same company, or the same rank, and he seemed vague about that too. ‘Stop badgering the poor lad,’ Ma had told me sharply when I’d tried to ask. ‘Don’t you go upsetting him with all those questions.’
Supper was a little better. My father and I talked about the stables, and Tom seemed interested in the horses. ‘Why don’t you come up tomorrow?’ Da suggested, laying down his knife and fork. ‘We can put you to work.’
‘See how you feel in the morning,’ Ma said, beginning to clear away the plates. ‘There’s no rush.’
Tom must have been up with the lark, though, because he and my father came to open up the stables together the next morning, and he went with Da on a trip in the ambulance later on. Seeing men in a worse state than himself must have helped him, I think, because he began to look a little more like himself, although it was hard to say exactly how. He had his dinner with us, under the stag’s head, and in the afternoon he and I polished the harness. We didn’t need to talk; it was lovely just to be together and catch his eye to share a smile every so often. I felt as though he was thawing out; you could almost see it happen by the minute.
Father had to take out Lady Vye in the gig so we got Moonlight ready, and Tom seemed to enjoy that too. There’s something so satisfying about brushing a horse: the feel of his muscles rippling under the warm, satiny coat, and the rhythmic sweep of your arm as you make your way around him, paying attention to the sensitive places where he’d like you to go gently. Moonlight’s twitchy about his eyes, so I always work very light and quick around his face with a hay wisp, and chat to him while I’m doing it so he knows not to worry.
‘Somebody’s taught you well,’ Tom said, and I realised he’d been standing back to watch me. ‘I’d have you in my stables like a shot.’
We took Moonlight out to the yard and harnessed him up to the gig. Tom seemed to droop a bit after my father had driven it away, so I told him that there was no time to rest: we still had Daffodil to groom, and Bella too. He made an effort but his heart wasn’t in it and after a little while, he went to sit down on a straw bale. I was about to make some joke about docking his wages, but then I saw his face and bit back the words.
‘They don’t run away, you know,’ he said, folding the hair cloth into a tight little parcel.
‘Who don’t?’ I asked, coming to sit beside him.
‘Horses. They just stand there with the bombs raining down on them and wait to be killed. I suppose they don’t realise what’s happening, don’t understand they can try to escape.’ He let the cloth fall between his hands.
‘What’s it like over there?’ I felt he wanted to tell me.
‘Like nothing on earth. It’s too awful, Grace - the things I’ve seen, the things I’ve had to do. You wouldn’t want to know. But the funny thing is, it’s the only place that seems real to me now. While I’m here with you, all safe and clean and comfortable, it feels as though I’m sleep-walking. I shall only come alive again when I’m back there, in the middle of hell. Yet how can I go back? I’m no use any more.’
‘Oh, come on,’ I said, trying to jolly him out of it. ‘Of course you are.’
‘No, I’m not. I’ve lost my nerve.’ He looked at me again, agonised. ‘Do you know what I did? I laid down my gun.’
That didn’t sound so very bad to me - not bad enough to be shot for, anyway. ‘What happened exactly?’ I asked. ‘Tell me about it. I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.’
He laughed: a dry, mirthless sound. ‘All right, I will, if you really want to know.’ I noticed his hands were shaking, so I squeezed them between my own. They were deathly cold.
‘We were on the Menin Road, just out of Ypres. Wipers, we call the place. Anyway, we’d been fighting to hold on to this crater for a while with the Huns shelling us all the time. Some fellows came along to relieve us at last, so we marched off, eight miles back to camp with our kit weighing us down. We were dead on our feet but they only let us sleep for two hours before we were woken up to get back there for a counter-attack, and nothing to eat or drink first except a mug of tea. So it was the same journey all over again, with a charge across open ground at the end of it. There were whizzbangs dropping everywhere and German snipers firing at us - the whole world was exploding. Suddenly there came an almighty blast and I thought the show was all over for me. Maybe I was unconscious for a while, I don’t know. Anyway, I came to my senses eventually and crawled into a shell hole to wait for the racket to die down.
‘I didn’t see him at first, but somebody else had found the place before me. There was a Hun lying there, with his leg shot to pieces. We looked each other up and down, and I suppose we both decided this hidey hole was big enough to share. After a while, I thought I might as well patch him up a bit, so I did. Put a bandage over the wound, and gave him some water. He could speak a bit of English - better than my German, at any rate - and he thanked me very nicely for my trouble. He showed me a picture of his girl, and we shared a cigarette. I only had the one left. Funny, isn’t it? We ended up sitting in that shell hole all night, and I felt quite fond of him by the morning. As soon as it became light enough to see, we shook hands and I found my way back to our trench. I knew the Huns would be sending out a party to collect their wounded, so he’d probably be all right.’
‘Well, what was wrong with that?’
He laughed again. ‘Everything. I should have killed Fritz or taken him prisoner, for a start, and I left my gun behind to make it ten times worse. “Shamefully casting away arms in the presence of the enemy,” that’s what they call it.’
‘They found you innocent, though.’
‘Only because of Colonel Vye. You should have heard the things he said about me, the statements he collected to prove I wasn’t a coward. I hardly recognised myself! He told me later that he’d been to school with my commanding officer, which must have clinched it. In the end they decided I’d been concussed and couldn’t be held responsible for my actions.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a game, Grace. Ordinary soldiers like me don’t mean anything to the top brass. They expect us to be slaughtered without a murmur and don’t give a damn about it until we stop killing in return. Well, I can’t do it any more. I didn’t forget my rifle: I left it behind on purpose because I won’t ever fire it again. So you see, I’m a dud. No earthly use to anyone out there. Or over here, either, for that matter.’
I couldn’t think of anything that would comfort him, so we just carried on sitting there for a while without speaking. And that was how Philip found us.
‘Hello, old chap,’ he said, holding out a hand for Tom to shake. ‘I heard you were back. Thought maybe we could go for a ride together? Like the old times.’
Tom got up and they clapped each other hard on the back in the way I’ve noticed men seem to do when they’re fond of each other. ‘I should enjoy that,’ Tom said - and I felt so relieved. Philip would know what to say.
Da came back to the stables not long after they’d left and told me to take myself off for a cup of tea, since Tom and I had been working so hard and got ahead of ourselves with the chores. I thought I’d see what Florrie was up to as we hadn’t had a proper chat for a few days so, after a quick wash and brush-up, I made my way to the kitchen. Mr Fenton passed me in the corridor which was strange, as he was usually busy butlering upstairs at that time of day, but I didn’t have a chance to wonder why. Someone had suddenly cried out from within the room. It was an unearthly noise, like nothing I had ever heard before: a single note of utter, heartbroken despair which turned my blood to water.
I knew instantly w
ho was making that terrible sound, and why.
Sixteen
I have a strong feeling that I shall come through safely; but nevertheless, should it be God’s holy will to call me away, I am quite prepared to go … and you, dear Mother and Dad, will know that I died doing my duty to my God, my country, and my King … Fondest love to all those I love so dearly, especially yourselves. Your devoted and happy son, Jack
From a letter by Second Lieutenant John Engall to his parents from France, 1 July 1916. He was killed three days later, aged 20.
Florrie was sitting there with Mrs Jeakes’ arm around her shoulders and an open letter on the kitchen table in front of her. I recognised Alf’s handwriting on the envelope from all the others she kept under her pillow, and for a moment, became foolishly hopeful. Perhaps it wasn’t the very worst news? But Mrs Jeakes caught my eye and gave a little shake of her head.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said quietly, getting up.
I took her place at the table and rubbed Florrie’s back. She had begun to cry now: great gasping sobs that wracked her whole body. ‘There, there, Florrie,’ I murmured helplessly. All I could do was find a fresh handkerchief and put my arm around her, though I think she hardly knew I was there.
‘Not my Alf,’ she whispered when at last she could speak. ‘Not my darling boy. How shall I manage without him?’
I had no idea. Alf was Florrie’s whole world. She had no mother or father to love her, only solid, decent Alf Fortescue. Now he was dead, and all Florrie’s dreams - a husband to cook for, a brood of fair-haired children who were the spit of him, a cottage with a garden for potatoes and runner beans - were gone too. Nothing I could say would take away the pain of that. I remembered what she’d once said to me, about standing at the edge of a cliff. Now she was falling, as she’d known she must, falling alone into an ocean of grief and likely to drown in it.
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