by Mark Morris
Basically, what I’m saying is that the male population of Britain had no fucking clue what they were letting themselves in for. It was horrible looking at the men queueing with me, many of whom were barely old enough to shave, and knowing that many – most – of them would be heading off to war and never coming back. No doubt they thought of war as a playground game, as a fun and exciting adventure. From the snippets of chatter I picked up, it was clear that the majority of them expected to send Jerry packing without too much trouble, and return home to a hero’s welcome in time for Christmas, grinning and bedecked with medals.
From my modern perspective there was surprisingly little cynicism in these overheard conversations, surprisingly little doubt, and surprisingly little criticism – in fact, none whatsoever – of the powers-that-be. It seemed no matter what your status in life – whether you be king or politician, a member of the privileged classes or a humble working man – the general consensus was that you were all in this together, fighting side by side for freedom and justice, secure in the knowledge that evil would be conquered and good would prevail.
All of which made the belittling comments of the man ahead of me in the queue, and the sneery laughter that followed, strange to hear. It was a bum note in the general atmosphere of camaraderie. As I looked up the length of the queue I heard, but didn’t see, someone (presumably the ‘runt’) respond to the bullish man’s insult. The tone the ‘runt’ used was defiant, but his actual words were obscured by the bluster of the wind and by the fact that he was standing with his back to me, presumably facing his aggressor.
Whatever he said must have been cutting, though, because the laughter that followed his retort was a startled, even admiring, whoop of mirth. The tail end of the laughter was superseded by an animal-like snarl and the bullish man’s voice again, angry with humiliation: ‘Why, you little shit! I’ll give you a hiding you’ll never forget!’
As the queue ahead of me, about halfway between where I was standing and the door of the recruiting station, bulged and rippled, I was already moving, because suddenly I knew that this was it. I’d arrived in this time period wondering how I’d meet Frank, realising I had no idea which recruitment office to go to, and on which day, and at what time.
Then I’d realised it didn’t matter. Frank had told me it would happen, which meant that therefore it would. It was a fait accompli – or maybe even a Fate accompli. All I had to do was act on what little information I had, and destiny would do the rest.
Thinking back to my conversation with Frank on the tube after he’d rescued me from the trap that Benny Magee had led me into in Queens Road Cemetery in Walthamstow, I recalled him telling me he’d been born in Lewisham and that he’d been training to be a draughtsman when war had broken out. I’d therefore headed to the Lewisham recruiting office, rather than the one closest to my house in Kensington, in the hope our paths would cross. Frank had also told me, during that same tube conversation, that he’d died (or would die) at Ypres in 1917 at the age of twenty. As 1917 was still three years away, that meant Frank would currently be seventeen. So like a lot of the men eager to head off to war he’d be little more than a kid. Younger even than my eldest daughter, Candice.
As I hurried towards what seemed to be a scuffle in the queue ahead, the knot of men surrounding it swelled even further, then broke apart. A few of them staggered back as two bodies hurtled sideways on to the pavement. One was a tall, burly guy in his twenties with red hair jutting from beneath the brim of a grey cap, and a complexion like lumpy, freckled cheese. The other, flailing and scrapping like a cornered cat, was Frank Martin. The burly man had him round the throat and had lifted him clean off the ground.
At seventeen Frank was even weedier than the version of him I’d known in my own time. His thin, slightly ferrety face was bright red through lack of air, and his dark hair was drooping over his forehead in oily strands.
To give him credit, though, he was making a good job of fighting his corner. The red-haired man was twice as broad as Frank and a good eight to ten inches taller, but Frank was lashing out at him as he hung in the air, landing punches wherever he could – which, to be honest, were mostly ineffectual thumps on his assailant’s tree-trunk arms and bulging shoulders.
Almost casually the red-haired man drew back his free arm, as if to let loose an arrow from a bow, and curled his meaty fingers into a fist. From my perspective the fist looked about the size of Frank’s head, and the arm about to propel it forward looked as if it would give the fist more than enough momentum to knock Frank’s block clean off his shoulders.
By now I was running fast enough for the wind to catch hold of the brim of my hat and whip it from my head.
‘Oi, Ginger!’ I yelled. ‘Try picking on someone your own size!’
Fist poised, the red-haired man was caught momentarily off-guard. He half-turned so suddenly that he stumbled, inadvertently both loosening his grip on Frank’s throat and drawing him closer.
I’ll say this for Frank – he had bloody good reflexes. Making the most of his opportunity, he kicked out at his assailant, his foot making a solid thock as it connected with the ginger man’s shinbone.
His attacker’s face contorted and he let loose a girlish howl of pain. His grip on Frank’s throat slackened further, allowing Frank to wriggle free. Instead of making a break for it, though, Frank drew back his arm, jumped up and socked the ginger man in the eye. The man’s head snapped back and his cap fell to the pavement. I was still running at him full-pelt, and before he could recover I thrust out both hands and shoved him as hard as I could.
The bloke was as compact as an ox, and if he hadn’t already been tottering I might have done no more than jar my arms. But because he was off-balance over he went, a look of dumb incomprehension on his face, his arms windmilling behind him. He landed on his arse with a coccyx-crunching thump that made me wince. Sitting there, legs and arms akimbo, he resembled an over-sized baby. When I glanced at Frank, he looked at me and grinned. His face was flushed, his tie was askew and one side of his collar was sticking up in the air like a crumpled white bat’s wing, but he looked utterly gleeful. I’d never seen him grin like that before, and it was an expression both joyous and heart-rendingly painful to see.
We were only able to enjoy the moment for a couple of seconds, though. As stunned as Ginger had been by the way the tables had been turned on him, he recovered quickly. With a roar he scrambled to his feet.
‘You fucking sods! I’ll have the fucking both of yer! Yer dead men!’ he bellowed.
As he lumbered towards us, I tensed, poised between fight and flight. Although I was as tall as Ginger, he was a lot heftier than me, and despite coming from a rough neighbourhood and having the kind of face that sometimes made people uneasy (apparently my default expression, as I’d been variously told in the past, was moody and intense) I wasn’t much of a scrapper.
I glanced at Frank again to gauge his intentions, wondering whether he was of a mind that we should join forces and put this bully down for good. Before it became a decision we’d be forced into making, though, fate intervened, in the form of several other blokes in the queue who started to pipe up on our behalf.
First to speak was a squat, dark-bearded, balding man with a Scottish accent. ‘Ach, they beat ye fair and square, man. I’d accept that if I were ye.’
There were grunts of assent, nods of agreement. Like a cornered animal, Ginger rounded on the dark-bearded man and snarled, ‘I’ll lay you out too, Scotty, if you don’t shut yer trap.’
Now another man jumped in, rangy like me, but pugnacious-looking. In an accent that was pure East End, he said, ‘You have a go at him, mate, and you’ll have to have a go at me too. Like the rest o’ these gents, I’m here today to stand up to a pack of bullies across the sea. But before I give the Hun what for, I’d just as happily stand up to bullies on me own soil.’
The roars of assent were louder this time. Some of the men stepped forward, fists raised defiantly in Ginger’s
direction.
Ginger looked from one man to another, his anger turning to petulance and then to uncertainty. He looked to his knot of cronies, who had initially egged him on with their sneering laughter, but they’d lapsed into silence and were now looking at their shoes or huddling into their jackets, keen to disassociate themselves from their thuggish companion.
Ginger looked first at me and then at Frank. ‘You haven’t heard the last of this,’ he said, and stabbed his finger in our direction, ‘neither of you. I’ll have you yet, you mark my words.’
‘Yeah, you and the Kaiser’s army,’ retorted Frank, and everyone laughed.
Ginger’s face went as red as his hair. He clenched his fists, gave us one more murderous look, then stalked away.
A few of the men catcalled after him, but the general mood was one of great good humour. The incident seemed to have stirred the collective blood, to have brought us all together, reminding us – on this unseasonably cold and wind-swept day – that we were here to unite against a common enemy. Conversation swelled and bubbled in the wake of the bully’s departure; hands were shaken; strangers introduced themselves to strangers.
I stepped towards Frank, hand outstretched. ‘Mate of yours, was he?’ I asked, nodding towards Ginger’s retreating back.
‘Bosom pal,’ Frank said. ‘Wasn’t that obvious?’
His hand met mine, and it was warm, his grip strong. He was so full of life I felt like weeping.
‘I’m Alex,’ I said. ‘Alex Locke.’
‘Frank Martin,’ said Frank.
I nodded at a pub called The Crown, which was across the road, opposite the recruiting station. ‘Fancy a pint once we’ve joined up?’
Frank’s grin widened. ‘Why not?’
THREE
COSMIC BALANCE
I mulled it over for a long time before deciding to go ahead. In the back of my mind, though, I always knew that now I had the means at my disposal – i.e. the ability to use the heart without it half-killing me – I’d have to give it a try. If I didn’t, and everything went tits up at some later date, I knew I’d only end up wondering what might have happened if I had. And more to the point, whether, by avoiding what seemed like an obvious solution, I’d made things unnecessarily difficult for myself.
I reasoned too that if it wasn’t meant to be then it wouldn’t work out. And that if it was meant to be, then it would. In short, I’d be putting myself into the hands of Fate, just as I had when I’d gone along to the recruiting station in Lewisham. I’d left the timing of that up to destiny, and things had worked out just fine. I’d met Frank as I was supposed to, we’d joined up together, and now, despite the disparity in our ages, we were great pals.
In fact, it was Frank who I talked the whole thing over with, in a roundabout way, one night in The Globe over a few pints. The Globe was a poky little boozer in Lambeth, not far from the Bethlehem Royal Hospital – or Bedlam, as it was more popularly known.
It had been a couple of weeks since that blustery day when we’d first put paid to Ginger and joined up together. Since then we’d been kicking our heels, waiting for our call-up papers. Such was the enthusiasm among the men of Britain when war had been declared that many recruiting stations had had to temporarily close down in order to deal with the backlog of paperwork that needed processing before the thousands of eager volunteers could become bona fide members of the armed forces.
When Frank and I had reached the front of the recruitment office queue two weeks earlier, the flustered-looking officer on duty had simply taken our names and addresses and told us we’d be contacted ‘in due course’. Frank had learned from a bloke at his work, whose cousin was in the Royal Fusiliers, that we could be waiting a couple of months before we heard anything further. According to Frank’s work mate’s cousin, it was a logistical nightmare trying to fix up quarters and find suitable training facilities for the huge influx of new recruits. Added to which there was a shortage of uniforms, weapons and food. The Great War might only be a few weeks old, but already it was taking a massive toll on the country’s infrastructure and resources.
It was odd how a new century and a new monarch, or more especially the death of one who had epitomised the era that was named after her, could alter the mood and ethos of a country. Although the current year was only a couple of decades on from my three-month sabbatical in Victorian London, it felt like a different age entirely. The London of the 1890s had been a city of horse-drawn carriages, thick fog, gas-lit streets and elaborate, cumbersome clothing. More pertinently it had been a city of extremes – of astounding technological and commercial progress on the one hand and chronic poverty on the other.
Now, though, things seemed to have… the only phrase that sprang to mind was ‘settled down’. Although ongoing social reform under the Liberal government, which had come to power in 1906, had to be a good thing, to me London seemed to have lost much of its colour and vitality, to have acquired a drabness, like a set of once fresh and fashionable clothes that had now faded and sagged out of shape.
Perhaps it was simply the dark cloud of war, which hung over everything; perhaps it was my own misconception of the world around me; or maybe it was even that I didn’t have Clover here to keep me company, as I had in the 1890s. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t help thinking that the London of 1914 needed a bloody good shot in the arm. The clothes that people wore were simpler, more sombre and less individual than they’d been twenty years earlier, and even the way people talked had changed. The mannered, formal, often colourful verbosity of the Victorians had, in a very short time, given way to a simpler, more homogenised way of speaking – one that seemed closer to how my parents and grandparents had spoken in the ’60s and ’70s, even though that era was still another half-century down the line.
The Globe, where I’d taken to meeting up with Frank most evenings (I had no idea whether, in this day and age, Frank was underage, and I didn’t ask – if he wasn’t, it would have seemed a bloody weird question), was poky and low-ceilinged, the furniture, floors and bar hewn of dark, dusty wood, the air grainy with pipe smoke. The local brew was strong – though it was also tepid and sometimes tasted a bit funky, on which evenings I favoured whisky to avoid the squits (not wine, though, which was my usual tipple at home; wine was for the ‘toffs’). The clientele was one hundred per cent male, aside from the landlord’s wife, who had a lazy eye and a permanent sneer. A fire roared in the grate to the right of the main bar, whatever the weather, and tarnished horse brasses adorned the walls.
By modern standards The Globe was a quiet pub, though sometimes, later in the evening, a sing-song would break out, occasionally accompanied by an enthusiastic plonk on the piano. For the most part, though, the only sounds to punctuate the smoky, somnolent atmosphere were the click of dominoes, the crackle of logs burning in the grate and the low rumble of conversation.
It hadn’t been difficult cultivating a friendship with Frank, a fact that helped alleviate the guilt I felt at the sense that I was manipulating events, and therefore him, simply to keep Destiny, or Fate, or whatever, on the right path. He was a lively, bright lad, and he seemed mature for his age – though that might have been because the young people of this time were expected to shuck off the indulgences of childhood as soon as they left school and become adults almost overnight, usually marrying in their early twenties.
It was the last day of August, a Monday, which was significant to me only insofar as a couple of weeks earlier I’d promised myself I’d come to a decision by the end of the month as to whether I’d do what I’d been thinking of doing ever since (more or less) waking up in my new nanite-enhanced body. Halfway across the world the First Battle of Garua was taking place in Nigeria between British and German forces, a skirmish that would result in a German victory. But here in Lambeth, even though talk in the country was of little else, the War still seemed not only impossibly distant, but not entirely real.
Frank and I were on our third pint of the evening, or maybe our fourt
h. He may have been only seventeen, and have weighed ten stone soaking wet, but I’ll say this for him – he couldn’t half put it away. In fact, sometimes I had a job keeping up – and so it was proving this evening. He still looked bright as a button, whereas I was feeling woozy and dull-headed, despite the nanites in my system. I’m not sure whether I’d been consciously planning to discuss my dilemma with Frank, or whether it was simply that I felt if I didn’t share it with someone soon I’d burst. At any rate, all at once, my inhibitions loosened by alcohol, I heard myself asking, ‘Listen, Frank, have you ever read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells?’
Frank looked momentarily surprised by the left-field nature of the question, then pushed out his bottom lip in lieu of a shrug. ‘Can’t say as I have. He’s the coward, isn’t he? Always going on about war being wrong and all that?’
‘I don’t think he’s a coward,’ I said. ‘A pacifist maybe.’
‘Same thing, ain’t it?’
‘Not really. But anyway – you know of it? The Time Machine? You know the story?’
Frank screwed his face up, as if trying to recall the name of a distant cousin. ‘Is that the one about the bloke who can go into the future?’ He snorted. ‘A bit daft, if you ask me. Kids’ stuff.’
Resisting the urge to discuss the merits and demerits of Wells’s far-reaching vision, I said, ‘Yes, but what if it was true? What if you could go into the future? Or the past for that matter?’
Frank looked at me as though I was simple. ‘You can’t, though, can you?’
‘Just bear with me,’ I said, trying not to become frustrated at his lack of imagination.
‘Bear with what?’ he said, a note of irritation in his voice. ‘What’s the point of this, Alex? Whatever I might look like to you, I’m not a bloody kid any more.’