Echoes of Yesterday

by Mary Jane Staples

  Out came Rosie with her violin and bow.

  ‘What’s this for?’ asked Chinese Lady.

  ‘Well, old love,’ said Boots, ‘as you’re one of the workers of the world and the effective voice of the family, I’m going to take you for a celebratory jig on the lawn while Rosie fiddles.’

  ‘Yes, up you get, Nana,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Yes, up you get, Maisie,’ smiled Mr Finch.

  ‘I’ll do no such thing,’ said Chinese Lady, ‘I’ve never done any jig on a lawn in my life, and I’m not startin’ now.’

  ‘Come on, Mum, up you get,’ said Emily.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Chinese Lady, but Boots took hold of her hands and drew her to her feet. ‘Listen, my lad, if you think at my age I’m doin’ any jig with you—’

  ‘Go on, Dad,’ said Tim.

  ‘What tune?’ asked Rosie, cradling her violin.

  ‘Try “One Man Went To Mow”,’ said Boots, ‘that should be lively enough.’

  Rosie laughed and began to scrape. Tim, Emily, Annabelle, Nick and Mr Finch all began to sing.

  One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow,

  One man and his dog, went to mow a meadow!

  Boots began a jig over the lawn with Chinese Lady.

  Two men went to mow, went to mow a meadow,

  Two men, one man and his dog, went to mow a meadow!

  Rosie’s laughing eyes were alight. Chinese Lady was doing little galloping jigs with her only oldest son.

  Three men went to mow, went to mow a meadow,

  Three men, two men, one man and his dog, went to mow a meadow!

  A woman’s voice sailed over the hedge from the garden next door.

  ‘What’s going on over there?’

  ‘Just a bit of a jig, Mrs Fletcher,’ called Tim.

  ‘Can we join in?’

  ‘Yes, come round,’ called Boots, ‘and bring your dog, if you like.’

  ‘Boots, if you don’t stop gallopin’ me about, I won’t be responsible for me actions,’ gasped Chinese Lady.

  ‘Leg it, old girl,’ said Boots.

  Six men went to mow, went to mow a meadow,

  Six men, five men, four men, three men, two men, one man and his dog, went to mow a meadow!

  Mr Finch smiled.

  Chinese Lady was laughing.

  Chapter Four

  Polly, still maudlin, still with the years of war on her mind, had made slow progress from one place to another, each place known to her. She arrived, inevitably, in Albert. She drove into the town, its war-damaged buildings rebuilt or repaired. She parked outside the estaminet run during the war by Jacques Duval, and where, during the run-up to the Somme offensive, it had been full each evening of Tommies due to go over the top and run into a merciless German fire. She went in, and the first person she saw wiping a table top clean was Jacques himself, now stout and balding. Behind the wine counter was a girl. She was polishing glasses, and Polly supposed she had replaced Helene. She smiled at Polly. There was only one customer present, an old man sitting at a corner table with a glass of cognac in front of him. He was talking to himself, as some old men do.

  ‘Jacques?’ said Polly.

  The proprietor turned and looked at her, seeking recognition.

  ‘Madame?’ he said.

  ‘You don’t remember me, Jacques?’

  Jacques searched her face again.

  ‘Ah, wait, wait,’ he said. ‘Once in a while someone comes back, to visit the cemeteries, to look for the graves of their old comrades – wait, yes, I know you. Let me think.’

  ‘Think of ambulances,’ said Polly.

  ‘Ah,’ said Jacques, and smiled then. ‘Now I know. Ma’moiselle Polly.’

  ‘Just Polly, Jacques.’

  ‘Not married?’ smiled Jacques.

  ‘No, not yet,’ said Polly, ‘the right gentleman has eluded me. Will you serve me a coffee with cognac and perhaps have a cognac yourself?’

  ‘A pleasure,’ said Jacques. ‘And a little conversation before my evening customers arrive?’

  ‘Then I must go to the hotel and book myself a room,’ said Polly.

  ‘For some of those who come back, there’s a room here, ma’moiselle, with breakfast.’

  ‘Jacques, how kind, it would suit me very well for a night or two,’ said Polly, and sat down at a table with the amiable proprietor.

  ‘Eloise,’ said Jacques to the girl, ‘coffee for – ah, already, my chicken?’

  ‘Yes, I heard what was wanted,’ said Eloise, smiling, and brought two coffees and two cognacs to the table. Brown-haired and with a fair complexion, she had the fresh look of the young. Seventeen, thought Polly. God, less than half my own age. ‘You are English, ma’moiselle?’ said the girl, eyeing Polly with interest.

  ‘Yes, one more of those who sometimes come to visit the wartime places,’ said Polly.

  ‘I am half English myself, am I not, Uncle Jacques?’ said Eloise.

  ‘So you are,’ smiled Jacques. ‘Eloise, alas, has lost both her parents,’ he said to Polly. ‘Her mother was a cousin of mine. Now she lives with us and works with us.’

  ‘For hardly any wages,’ said Eloise, and laughed. Jacques grinned, sipped coffee and took a little mouthful of the cognac. ‘But who would ask for big wages when one is looked after so well? Ma’moiselle, you were here during the terrible war?’

  Polly said she had been an ambulance driver and stationed in Albert for many months in 1916. Eloise said many brave Englishwomen drove ambulances according to her Uncle Jacques, and that he had known many because they drank their wine here with the English Tommies.

  ‘Yes, I was one,’ said Polly, ‘which is why your Uncle Jacques managed to recognize me after he’d looked at me long enough. Do all my extra years show, Jacques?’

  ‘No, no, Ma’moiselle Polly,’ protested Jacques, ‘I recognized you because although there have been several years—’

  ‘Eighteen,’ said Polly.

  ‘Several or eighteen, what does it matter when most of them have passed you by?’ said Jacques.

  ‘Eloise, you have a very gallant uncle,’ smiled Polly, letting the warming fire of cognac linger in her mouth and throat.

  ‘Oh, he is always bowing and nodding to ladies good-looking,’ said Eloise. ‘Did you know many English soldiers, ma’moiselle?’

  ‘All of them except one,’ said Polly.

  ‘All of them?’ said Eloise in astonishment.

  ‘Well, perhaps not all,’ said Polly, ‘although I sometimes felt it was like that.’

  ‘But who was the one you did not know?’

  ‘Oh, that’s a very long story, Eloise.’

  ‘I should like to hear it,’ said Eloise.

  ‘Ah, stories,’ said Jacques, ‘who does not have some to tell?’

  Three patrons arrived then, all talking together, and Jacques excused himself to Polly. Polly finished her coffee and cognac, then collected her luggage from the car. Eloise took her up to the room Jacques had offered her. It was clean, comfortable and adequate, and Polly assured her it would do very well.

  She unpacked and freshened up. She wondered what she was doing, lingering in France and in this strange, lamenting mood. She stretched out on the bed and read several chapters of the book she had brought with her. All Quiet On The Western Front. It was a bitter, satirical and truthful book, written by the German author, Remarque, and it looked at the war from the point of view of the ordinary German soldiers, whose disillusionment was no different from that of the Tommies.

  She went out later and dined at a restaurant. If other diners wondered what she was doing by herself, she gave their glances hardly any consideration at all. She still did not need company. Her own was enough for her at the moment. Nevertheless, when she returned to the estaminet it wasn’t long before she was sitting at a table with several of Jacques’ patrons, some of whom were old soldiers. Very quickly they began to exchange wartime reminiscences with her. Polly stood treat, and Eloise brought the o
rdered bottles of wine to the table.

  ‘Here we are, ma’moiselle,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Polly, looking up at the girl. Eloise smiled, and Polly thought then that her brown hair, oval features and fair complexion were more Anglo-Saxon than Gallic. Grey eyes held a little hint of blue. ‘I see now,’ said Polly, ‘yes, you are half English, Eloise.’

  One of the old French soldiers laughed.

  ‘So are many children of France,’ he said, and they all laughed.

  ‘That isn’t funny,’ said Eloise, and did to the joker what Helene before her had done to more than one Tommy. She hit him over the head with her tin tray, then laughed herself as she went back to the bar.

  ‘Ah, but there it is, ma’moiselle,’ said the joker to Polly, ‘some men arrive to make war, and make love instead.’

  ‘Was Eloise’s father a British soldier, then?’ asked Polly.

  ‘That is so, ma’moiselle, but he fell in action before she was born,’ said another man.

  ‘No woman should have married a front-line soldier during the war,’ said Polly, forgetting that she would have married Boots only a day after meeting him.

  The Frenchmen looked at each other.

  ‘There was no marriage, ma’moiselle, the war did not give them time,’ said one.

  ‘So Eloise herself has said,’ nodded another.

  Polly, with her brittle smile, said, ‘Well, at least, whoever the man was, he has left France with a flower.’

  ‘An English rose, ma’moiselle.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps you could call Eloise that,’ said Polly.

  She spent the following morning wandering around Albert, taking in a visit to the building which the Red Cross and St John Ambulance Brigade had used for their headquarters. It was still standing. With the help of her Northumbrian sergeant, Alice had pinched silk stockings from the Commandant. But neither she nor Polly had made any immediate use of them. The Somme got in the way, and when Alice was given Blighty leave, Polly gave back the pair Alice had pinched for her. She knew by then that Alice was going to marry Sergeant Ben Hawes. Two pairs are better than one for a bride, Alice, she had said.

  Polly lunched in the town and returned to the estaminet in the afternoon. The place was quiet then, and Jacques and Eloise were pleased to see her and to have time to talk to her.

  ‘Ma’moiselle, would you like some tea?’ asked Eloise.

  ‘Don’t think me ungracious, Eloise, but—’

  ‘Oh, it will be English tea, made with boiling water and with milk,’ said Eloise. ‘My mother watched my English father make it in her parents’ kitchen, and told me about it. Coffee, yes, he would drink her coffee, but he always said the most refreshing hot drink was tea.’

  ‘I’d love tea in the way your father made it,’ smiled Polly, who had taken to the girl.

  ‘Ah, très bien,’ said Eloise, and disappeared.

  Jacques smiled and said, ‘When she brings the tea, she will ask if you knew her English father and where his grave is, as she asks all the English who come back here to visit because of the war.’

  ‘Oh, it’s true I knew a great many of our men, Jacques,’ said Polly, ‘but not every name.’

  ‘It will make no difference,’ said Jacques, ‘she will still ask. She sees herself as a child of love, which perhaps she is.’

  ‘Sometimes, Jacques, it wasn’t like that,’ said Polly. ‘I’m afraid many of our Tommies scattered their seed about very casually.’

  ‘Don’t tell Eloise that,’ said Jacques.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Polly.

  ‘She’s quite sure her father would have married her mother if he hadn’t perished on the Somme,’ said Jacques.

  ‘Jacques, I think the very best of our world perished there,’ said Polly.

  ‘Ma’moiselle,’ said Jacques gently, ‘does it haunt you?’

  ‘Sometimes, Jacques, sometimes.’

  ‘You are not alone,’ said Jacques. ‘As for Eloise, she’ll certainly talk to you again about her father. She cannot help wondering what happened to him after he fell in action. He was lost in the mud, perhaps, for neither she nor her mother ever found his grave in any of the Somme cemeteries. Yes, she’ll talk to you again.’

  Sure enough, when Eloise brought a pot of steaming tea, with milk and sugar, and placed the tray before Polly, she said, ‘My father was an English soldier, ma’moiselle, who lost his life before I was born. Perhaps you saw him somewhere, perhaps you knew him. See, look, this is his photograph, which I’ve kept since my mother died a year ago. Would you have known him?’ She placed a framed sepia-tinted photograph, a snapshot, on the table in front of Polly. ‘There, ma’moiselle, that is my English father. He looks a nice man, don’t you think? Would you have met him, ma’moiselle?’

  Polly smiled at the girl, at her grey eyes bright with the hopes and optimism of the young, the eyes of a girl wanting to know all she could about the man who had loved her mother.

  ‘Well, let me see,’ said Polly, and looked down at the snapshot of a man standing by a farm gate, a man in the peaked cap, shirt and trousers of a British soldier obviously out of the line for a while, the sleeves of the shirt rolled up and a large bucket depending from his right hand. He had a smile on his face. Polly stared, her eyes opening wide, her body suffering the shock of incredulity. It couldn’t be, it was too unbelievable. But there was no mistake. Polly of all people knew there wasn’t, despite her incredulity. It was Boots as a young man, a soldier of the trenches, yet already no longer young. Boots had been twenty at the time of the Somme, a few months older than herself, she knew that, but it wasn’t a young man in this well-preserved snapshot, it was a veteran of France and Flanders, a sergeant. Polly knew what so many others knew, that it was the sergeants who were the backbone and strength of the British Army. She could not take her eyes off the snapshot, nor detach her mind from all it meant. She heard Eloise say something. ‘Excuse me, Eloise?’

  ‘Ma’moiselle, did you perhaps meet this soldier, my father? See, if you drove an ambulance, perhaps you know where his grave is. My mother went to the British town headquarters after the first weeks of the battle, to find out what had happened to him, and they examined the casualty lists and said he had fallen with his company commander in Trones Wood.’

  He had fallen, yes, Polly knew that. He had fallen blinded and unconscious, alongside Major Harris, and perhaps the mistake of placing him among the fatal casualties had been all too easily made at the time, although it would have been rectified later in the regimental records of the West Kents. But this girl’s mother, a Frenchwoman, had not been advised of the mistake. And why should she have been? She was not married to Boots, she was merely a woman who had asked after him, and perhaps at the time she did not even know she was expecting his child.

  Drawing breath, Polly said, ‘When were you born, Eloise?’

  ‘At the end of March in 1917,’ said Eloise, and Polly thought, yes, that would be right. The West Kents had been billeted near Albert for the first three weeks in June, 1916, and gone up to the line a week before the offensive began. She looked again into the girl’s grey eyes with their hint of blue, and saw the eyes of Boots there. Boots had a hidden streak of steel, and when it surfaced it showed, it put a faint blue into the grey.

  So, he was the father of this bright young girl. Polly felt the worst kinds of emotion stir: anger, jealousy and even bitter envy. The Frenchwoman in question had known him in a way she herself never had. He had given the woman an enchanting daughter. Who was going to tell him? The mother was dead, but the daughter existed, his natural daughter. Must I tell him? Should anyone tell him, when it was all so long ago? What would it do to Emily, to Tim and to Rosie? What would it do to Boots himself?

  One could say nothing because, after all, it was only one more story similar to many others relating to a traumatic yesterday.

  ‘It’s right, your mother died last year, Eloise?’

  ‘Yes, ma’moiselle, and her pare
nts, my grandparents, died earlier, leaving their farm to my mother’s brother, a hard man. I did not get on with him, so when my mother died I came to live with Uncle Jacques and Aunt Marie.’

  Jacques’ wife Marie appeared then. She was a peaceful-looking woman who liked to keep herself in the background with her housework, her cooking and her cats. She smiled vaguely at Polly, picked up a bottle of wine from the counter, and returned to her quiet anonymity.

  ‘Your father spent time on the farm with your mother, Eloise?’ said Polly. Boots, you swine, she thought, you’ve never said a single word to me about your Frenchwoman. No wonder I never had a chance to meet you, you were spending all your time with her. ‘I mean, this snapshot looks as if it was taken on the farm.’

  ‘Oh, yes, his company was billeted in the long barn,’ said Eloise, ‘and Mama took the snapshot a few days before he left. Ma’moiselle, the photograph is interesting you? Do you think it’s of a soldier you knew? If so, perhaps you could help me find out if he has a grave somewhere. I should so like to visit it and place flowers there sometimes. See, he was such a fine-looking man, don’t you think? Mama loved him very much.’

  My God, thought Polly, what am I to say and do?

  ‘For how long did your mother know him, Eloise?’

  ‘Oh, only for a few weeks,’ said Eloise, ‘while his company was at the farm. She always said it doesn’t take a lifetime for a woman to fall in love. Ma’moiselle, you haven’t said, did you know him?’

  ‘No, I never met him while I was in Albert, Eloise.’

  ‘But might you have heard of him? His name was Robert Adams, and he was a sergeant.’

  ‘I can truthfully say, Eloise, that all through my time in France, I never came across Sergeant Robert Adams.’

  ‘Eloise,’ said Jacques, ‘he was only one of many thousands of British soldiers.’

  ‘Yes, but one has to ask about him, Uncle Jacques. Someone might know if he has a grave in one of the cemeteries. It’s only right to try to find out, and only right too that his daughter should visit it and place flowers there in remembrance of him and his love for my mother.’