As he heard the Reverend Crum, an ancient cleric from the neighbouring parish, announce the subject of his sermon to be ‘Looking ahead to better times’, Philip realised he’d been stuck at home for almost six months. So much for his plans to go back to university for the Michaelmas term ’46. It was now late October and the term already half over.
Other people got on with life, he thought. Tucker wrote of his engagement to Margaret and their plans to open a restaurant in the spring, ‘Not sure what we’ll be dishing up apart from corned beef,’ while he stayed bogged down on the island, enjoying nothing except his weekly political debates in front of Bert Harvey’s fire.
‘So, although we may feel the sacrifices have been very great, there are always new sacrifices required of us,’ said Reverend Crum, casting hooded eyes around the congregation and prompting Philip to wonder why he didn’t resent his own sacrifices more. He supposed the truth was he didn’t know what he’d rather be doing. University seemed distant and unimportant. Limbo, The Rectory, Calbourne, Isle of Wight seemed as good a place as any to be, and it gave him an address from which to continue searching for Rosie.
Yesterday had brought a letter from Jean, who seemed to be thriving.
Getting on very nicely thank you very much for asking and when one of the senior girls is off I get to do some cutting as well as the perms and demiwaves that are so popular nowadays and I am tempted to have one myself. Thank you for asking about my sister but I am sorry to say she has not written and we are as a family begining to fear the worst though she was always a funny girl so you never know. Thanking you once again for your letter…
The anger returned. He remembered her in Fenwick’s restaurant, wiping the cream from her mouth with consciously ladylike movements, ‘That was a lovely cake.’ Leaving a little grease stain on the napkin. A smear of a life.
Another letter arrived, ‘very oddly addressed’ as his mother remarked, It was from Françoise. ‘The French girl who helped me!’ he shouted, making Mrs Edwards jump, ‘She’s alive!’
His mother seemed pleased. ‘Didn’t you say she came from a good family?’
Françoise, poor thing, sounded miserable. The parents were closing in, apparently, lining up suitable bores for her to marry. Philip read the letter over again, and later, examined how it made him feel. He was delighted she was alive. Thrilled. He felt great affection for her. He owed her the profoundest gratitude. But did he really want to go and see her now, as she suggested? Two weeks later, when his mother asked him if he’d sent a reply, he realised he’d forgotten to.
He corresponded much more frequently with Mr H Peacock of the Central Casualty Bureau in London, who punctiliously provided him with details of Mullens killed or wounded, adding there were unfortunately still a substantial number of victims of war unidentified. There followed a list of the burned beyond recognition, the dismembered, those of whom nothing remained but half a watch strap and ‘a quantity of human grease’. A smear of a life. But it was the woman aged approximately 20 years found crushed to death at Bethnal Green tube station together with her infant son, who stuck in Philip’s mind. He squeezed his eyes tight shut, opening them to see the Revd Crum frown in his direction.
‘Let us pray.’
Philip bowed his head. For an atheist who’d come back from Gateshead thinking of joining the Communist Party, he spent an awful lot of time in church.
After the service he waited outside the vestry to thank the vicar for coming and check whether he could manage next Sunday too. The Revd Crum’s brow fretted with an amazing number of wrinkles at the question. Rumpleheadskin, children called him.
‘Well, I expect so. Is there any news on when the new chap can be installed?’
‘I’m taking mother to look at a cottage tomorrow.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s any coal? I suffer rather badly with the cold these days.’
Philip followed his gaze to the gigantic cast iron monster of a stove he remembered as the bane of his father’s life. No. That was one sacrifice he wasn’t prepared to make. ‘I’m afraid we just can’t get hold of the fuel.’
‘Oh well. Never mind. Perhaps we’ll have a mild winter.’
But in December, the weather turned more bitterly cold than anyone could remember, prompting Mrs Seymour to at last to agree to move to a cottage on the outskirts of the village in two months’ time, and to instruct Philip to pack. He set about the huge task of sifting through the evidence of his parents’ thirty-year marriage, all contained on three floors of a rambling rectory so well supplied with storage spaces nothing had ever been thrown away. Periodically, his mother appeared wrapped in several cardigans to query his actions. ‘What are you doing with that? You’re not intending to throw that away, are you?’
For a while, Philip lingered sentimentally over discoveries like the box filled with tarnished sporting trophies won by his father, ‘High Jump 1906’, and his own moth-eaten pyjama case Panda, his old bedtime comfort, but as the temperature gauge fell further, he grew ruthless. The pile to be burned at the bottom of the garden grew higher.
Extreme cold drove his mother into the kitchen and the rectory’s only source of warmth. As December moved into January and the temperature stayed well below freezing the chill closed her up completely, freeing Philip of her fretful interrogations. It even turned her into a cook, huddled over the Aga, while Mrs Edwards, banished to the frosty regions at the end of the kitchen table, waded and snipped her way through acres of ancient curtains, reducing them to the neat fragments needed to clothe the cottage windows.
Dressed in an old tweed coat of his father’s, a deerstalker hat tied down over his ears and a pair of fingerless gloves, Philip mined the house of its contents, moving downwards from the icy loft, where trunks of dresses worn by his grandmother to parties in Delhi and Srinagar coexisted with the mummified corpses of rats and mice.
The thermometer recorded the lowest temperatures for fifty years. The cold entered him completely, so there seemed no other world before it nor beyond it, no past nor future, just another refrigerator of a cupboard to be opened, its contents dismantled and labelled to take, to be sold or carried down the garden to the no-use-to-anyone collection Philip imagined turning into a glorious bonfire at the end of the job.
It was a curious, Eskimo existence. He worked only while the short hours of daylight lasted, because the rationing of electricity and frequent power cuts made it impossible to work at night. When he blundered into the kitchen he felt like Scott or Amundsen returning briefly to base camp. The women roused themselves to greet him, to replace the old blanket under the door behind him and dole out hot soup and bread. They murmured enquiries as to out there, mumbling the cold, the cold, before lapsing into a silence broken by the scrape of his spoon against the empty bowl and the slow ticking of the sewing machine.
Even when Philip got out of the place, the old Riley packed with things for the saleroom or the Salvation Army, he found the chief topic of conversation remained the weather. Through scarves wrapped around faces, people wondered if this wasn’t another Ice Age or the result of all those bombs going off doing something terrible to the atmosphere. They told him of ice floes seen in the Medway, of birds falling, frozen, out of the sky. An auctioneer spoke of a farmer who’d taken to bringing his beasts indoors at night – ‘You know, like in the old days, to keep him and his missus warm in bed.’
Looking out of the window at the garden under a full moon one night in late January, Philip wondered if the extreme cold could be blamed for his being frozen to the spot and unable to move on. At last the packing-up was finished, and with it, hopefully, the temporary abdication of responsibility for his life.
Limbo. He needed to free himself. Go back to university. Join the Communist Party. Make the beast with two backs with a woman – and just about any woman, other than his mother or Mrs Edwards, would do. He remembered Rosie telling him that as a child she’d prayed to release the souls of unbaptised babies from Limbo. So many Hail Marys
for each little soul floating upwards to Heaven. Forget Rosie.
Under the moon, the frosted trees and bushes in the garden gleamed pale and sculpted as ivory carvings. On top of the pile a silvered sofa added a touch of the surreal. One thing to look forward to. Lighting the bonfire.
And next day brought an audience for the occasion. The new rector arrived with his wife and their five young children, ‘to decide where their furniture would go.’ Philip feared they’d get a cold reception from his mother, but she came out smiling, having apparently invited them herself. While she offered the parents an audience by the Aga, Philip invited the children to the bonfire.
It wasn’t quite so cold; the thicker cloud above suggested the possibility of snow, but the children waited miserably in their stiff woollen coats as Philip collected paraffin and newspapers. With sudden inspiration he pulled a moth-eaten green silk dress from the pile and announcing ‘This is what we need,’ began stuffing the bodice and sleeves with newspaper. The children joined in enthusiastically. They fashioned a head from an old pillowcase, dug out a straw hat, and watched enchanted as Philip hoisted their creation on to the sofa. Shortly afterwards, he struck a match. ‘Stand back, everyone!’
The flame licked at the stacks of yellowing Church Times, smoked, glowed red, and crackled through Tigger’s long-empty dog basket. Philip sprinkled on the last of the precious paraffin. The horsehair stuffing of the sofa caught and flames burst through the seat. The misshapen female’s skirt sizzled. Philip yelled, ‘Let’s play savages burning the missionary!’ and danced around the fire, whooping. The children clapped their hands against their mouths and followed suit. The figure flared and shrivelled. The fire roared, releasing a wonderful gusting wave of heat. But its intensity frightened the youngest, a boy of about three, into tears. Philip picked him up. ‘Don’t you like it? Shall I take you to the house to find your mother?’ Still staring at the fire, the child pressed his little body into Philip’s, sucked on one finger and shook his head.
Silent now, they watched. Blackened fragments of a past life floated in the still air. Mrs Seymour appeared, leading the parents down the garden and Philip, rather glad there was nothing recognisable left of the missionary, suddenly realised he’d been dancing round the bonfire of his miserable childhood.
He looked at his mother. He could pity her now, he thought, as she watched sooty shreds of herself borne aloft, but when she looked back, he knew she saw only the child in his arms, the child that could have been his own boy.
Two days later, Mrs Seymour, Mrs Edwards and Philip at last moved out, and the new family moved in. A week after that, Philip woke early to an enclosed, muffled feeling, not wholly explained by the smallness of the cottage bedroom, and sensed the snow had come. It filled the garden; the lane outside was under a virginal two feet of it. He floundered across the patch of garden to fetch a spade and set off for the rectory. It took an hour but it was worth it. The children’s excited voices floated down the drive as he dug his way towards them. They marvelled at the sight of him, thick-coated in snow, demanded he take them out sledging immediately, but he wanted a guided tour, so they scampered him along the corridors, showing him who was sleeping where, and showing too that they loved it; they loved the house. The rector’s wife appeared in her dressing gown yawning, smiling. Philip saw she was pregnant with another child. He could have shouted with joy at it all. That change could happen; that rooms long empty could be filled; that they could be so happy in this place where he’d known only misery.
The village was snowbound for a week. Philip spent most of it with the children, sledging, building a gigantic snowman and having endless snowball fights. When the snow cleared sufficiently for the postman to get through, he brought two letters. The first confirmed Philip’s appointment in March with his old tutor in Cambridge; the second was from Ross, inviting all the survivors of St Nazaire to meet in Falmouth on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the raid. Mountbatten had kindly agreed to address them, Ross wrote, scribbling at the bottom in his large flowing script, ‘Stop hiding yourself away on that island, Seymour! Looking forward very much to meeting up.’
30
Cambridge and London, 26 and 27 March 1947
After the snow came the thaw, and then rain, more rain than anyone had seen in years. With most of the West Country under water, Ross wrote again, changing the venue of the reunion from Falmouth to London. It was a pity but made things easier for Philip as he would be able to combine the two, travelling from the island up to Cambridge, staying a night, and then taking the train to London. After that, what? He’d done all he could for his mother so at last was free.
Cambridge looked – like Cambridge. Why the hell this came as a shock, Philip couldn’t think, because this was the feeling he had everywhere, wherever he went. Still, it struck him forcibly during the wet walk down Trumpington Street, and on his arrival at the college, where the same porter greeted him with the same deferential ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ the same polished wooden stairs wound up to his tutor’s room. Only the students were missing – most of them, anyway, down for the Easter vacation.
The Regency striped wallpaper was still on the walls, he sat in the familiar faded pink armchair, he accepted china tea in the delicate cups, and looked at a physically unaltered George Henry Wilkinson, whose discourses on English history had so entranced him as an undergraduate. Everything was the same – only Philip’s eyes had changed, coming at things sideways and catching them unawares; and instead of the Giant Intellect capable of making the legs of his Chippendale chairs tremble with awe at his pronouncements, there before him was a shirker of barely forty with a feeble handshake and disgusting yellow teeth.
Would I have seen him like that if he had been more welcoming? Philip asked himself. If, instead of averting his eyes and telling me what an exceptionally talented year the entry of ’46 was proving to be, he had looked me in the eye, asked me how I was and meant it?
‘Of course,’ Wilkinson had said, ‘of course, Seymour, you have a right to return, to resume your place.’ But where was the warmth, the encouragement? In the unexpected coolness of the atmosphere, Philip falteringly delivered the little speech he had prepared on his proposed area of research. He believed the perspective of the common soldier in war had been neglected by historians…though evidence of such soldiers’ lives could prove elusive in earlier conflicts, there was sufficient to pursue a study of the Napoleonic era…
He’d imagined an enjoyable spar, then conspiring with an enthusiastic Wilkinson to hone his proposal, but found himself stumbling on into a silence interrupted only by the cold chink of teacups. When a young man blundered into the room and was warmly greeted by Wilkinson – presumably as one of the gifted of ‘46 staying up for the vac – it was almost a relief. A relief, and then a humiliation, as he was asked to go over his ideas again, ‘for the benefit of Mr Andrews here,’ and saw glances between them of shared amusement bordering on ridicule that he could remember enjoying with Wilkinson in the old days at the expense of some other poor sap.
What a shit the man was, leaving Philip balancing an empty teacup on his knees while he and the Gifted One enthusiastically debated the Corn Laws. Excluded, Philip stared out of the mullioned window as lights came on in rooms on the other three sides of the quadrangle and the square of gravel and turf below softened with the dusk. A solitary man paced the square; then walked around again, deep in thought or perhaps distressed. It could be Murray, the slightly hunched shoulders, the thin body under the gown, pale hands joined behind his back. The figure started its third circuit. Philip shifted forward in his chair, craning to see more clearly, and the teacup and saucer fell on to the carpet. Wilkinson turned, open-mouthed. Picking up the unbroken china, Philip said cheerfully, ‘No harm done. Sorry to interrupt your fascinating discussion.’
‘We’re forgetting you, Seymour,’ Wilkinson forced a smile. ‘Can I offer you something to drink?’
A nasty little shit with crooked yellow teeth.
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But at least he’d made him pay. Cleared him out of sherry first; then made substantial inroads into his claret. Told him at the end he’d decided against returning to Cambridge after all. Intended to take his ideas elsewhere, or perhaps stick to the real world; taken a lurching, burping leave, and staggered out past ‘Good night, sir and hopes to see you again soon, sir,’ to his hotel, where he dreamed a terrible dream of Rosie wandering, destitute, dressed like a Polish refugee, a dying baby in her arms.
‘And we thought St Nazaire was the end of the world! Supposing the capital is not cut off by tornado, typhoon, hurricane or cyclone, we’ll kick off at St Giles’s Church, Bayswater at 3 p.m.. Let me know if you need a berth. A girlfriend of mine has offered to put up a select few. However, if you’re determined to slum it as usual, I believe some of your lot are booking into the Victory Club.’
Philip stuffed Ross’s latest scrawl back into the pocket of his demob suit and climbed the steps from the underground to find Marble Arch under yet another shower of March rain. He put up his collar. Two men in suits and bowler hats approached, their identical black brollies held aloft in farcical symmetry. Wherever you looked, there were those who had profited through others’ sacrifice. The eyes of one of the businessmen flitted briefly over Philip, registering, just for a moment, unease. They always recognised a soldier. Definitely no sacrifice there. Just another of those who stayed at home and got rich while others had their mouths stuffed with foreign earth. Usually there was just the studied avoidance, or, if confrontation could not be avoided, the pat phrases: ‘A shame I could not have done more myself,’ or ‘We’re all jolly grateful to you chaps, of course.’
The War Before Mine Page 27