Shelter

by Sarah Franklin

Gianni grabbed Fredo by the shirt tails and tried to pull him into his seat, whispering frantically. Seppe looked at the screen and goosebumps marched along his arms and down his neck. That wasn’t some anonymous landscape, not any more. They had moved down the narrator’s map and that was – now Seppe was out of his seat too, staring at the screen – that was Italy. It was Livorno! What was going on?

  The images were spiralling past faster than he could recognise them and he gripped the seat arm to stay upright. There were the familiar docks, the ships at their anchors out in deeper water, soldiers weighed down by rifles lining the pier. And there were the stables; he craned his neck, ridiculously, to check for the horses but they’d moved on already, the camera showing – santo cielo, could that really be right? Seppe leaned forward, the thudding in his ears drowning out the narrator.

  That was Churchill! It was barely credible, but there was no mistaking him. He was on some kind of launcher, taking off from Livorno dock, and all around him the caps of the navy, the peaked hats of the British Army. Churchill in Seppe’s city. What had happened? The old man sat splay-legged on the outermost edge of the boat, wide-brimmed hat making him look almost like Amos sitting out on the bench in summertime. The images on the screen scrambled his brain. What was this man, who sat like Amos, watching the world unfurl in front of him, doing in Seppe’s city?

  The images were blurred, only Churchill really clear in the centre of the screen. It was impossible to tell how many buildings had been damaged. The port looked largely intact, but what had happened in the battle for the city? Seppe’s heart beat as if he, himself, had taken up his weapon.

  Who has survived?

  The camera panned back to endless vistas of rubble, Churchill peering at some kind of plan that a British officer was explaining to him. Churchill in a jeep, cigar in mouth, driving through the streets past house frames snapped like twigs. It reeled past faster than Seppe could keep up with it, the strain of understanding what he was seeing compounded by the speed with which it whipped along. The camera remained resolutely on Churchill and Seppe wanted to reach up, ridiculously, pull aside the curtain at the side of the screen and see the rest of Livorno, just out of shot.

  Churchill in the jeep again, out on the road to the vineyards. The dust kicked up through the screen, stuck in his throat. Seppe knew that Livorno dust; it cloyed. The sun beat down and rendered it sharp and sticky on your lungs, not like here, where sunlight filtered through the leaves, green and warming.

  Churchill peering at a pile of brushwood as if he were here with them in the forest, not a thousand miles away inspecting the destruction of Seppe’s homeland.

  Fredo groaned, a pain that pierced, and Seppe saw what Fredo saw: the neck of an enormous cannon poking through the brush, the soldiers taking aim and the great gun juddering under the weight of its discharge. The film was silent now, the clouds of destruction speaking for themselves. They’re shooting at your home. This man is the enemy.

  There was nothing left of Livorno. No menace, no memories, just swathes of rubble. If any of Livorno had survived, it was hard to tell. Something lifted in Seppe and tears sprang. He had never dared hope for this. He could never have wished for destruction – that would be contemptible beyond all comprehension, make him no better than the men who had made his life untenable for months now. But in this moment all he could feel was relief. If there was no home to go to, his obligations to home were discharged.

  Then the map was back on the screen, showing the next point in the Allies’ move further across the north of Italy.

  Seppe risked a look at Fredo. Tears streamed down his cheeks, his fist opening and closing in desperation. He stared at the screen with eyes that saw who knows what. That’s how Seppe should be feeling, surely, not as if a weight had been removed? Guilt at his own reaction softened his usual antipathy towards Fredo. For all his bitterness, his antagonising of Seppe, the man clearly cared deeply about their mutual home town. Seppe should be ashamed of himself. But he wasn’t. His sense of relief was tinged now with an equally unattractive emotion: he was pleased to see Fredo suffer. After all these months of slow-burning aggressions, he couldn’t help but revel, even just momentarily, in Fredo’s distress.

  Seppe prodded Gianni. Gianni was a southerner, but he was passionate about home and would find Seppe’s reaction despicable if he ever caught a glimpse of it. Perhaps he could atone, however slightly, and at the same time get out of the cinema before Gianni noticed his lack of distress.

  ‘There’s no way Fredo can stay here in this state. I’ll take him back to camp.’

  Gianni’s face was a question in the gloom. You? Take him back, alone? Are you sure? But then he nodded, waved at the screen in explanation. ‘I’ll stay here with Lauren Bacall.’

  Fredo glowered when Seppe pushed him forward slightly more forcefully than the situation required, but his eyes were glazed, not really registering who ushered him out of the cinema. They’d barely woven their way through the grumbling rows and outside when Fredo’s legs gave way. Seppe shoved his shoulder under Fredo’s arm moments before his campmate’s head cracked against the brick of the cinema wall and heaved him across the street. The shops on either side were quiet and shuttered. Seppe nudged Fredo along the top of the hill, away from the town square at the bottom of the row of buildings, and shoved him through the bite of the hawthorn with more aggression than he possibly needed. A cobweb brushed his face and the drops of moisture transferred to his cheeks, substitute tears for the ones he couldn’t cry.

  ‘Keep quiet! If anyone hears you wailing they’ll report us both.’

  Fredo collapsed, his face contorted, his legs twitching their grief. Seppe’s gut twisted with the memory of their compatriots out in the desert, sand crusting the blood – and then of Alessa, legs and arms curled over her stomach, the stain spreading.

  Fredo would be so easy to kick like this, vulnerable, not expecting it. Seppe’s boot jerked and he curled away his toes with the force of the urge. He pulled his mind back to those scenes on the screen, but it was sterile, grey.

  He knelt beside Fredo, who was writhing still. ‘Perhaps some survived. We can’t know.’ But even as he said it the voice in his head grew louder and louder until it blocked out other words. Perhaps your father is dead. Perhaps it is all over for you now.

  ‘Fredo – the council offices. They were in ruins, no?’ He needed confirmation that he’d seen it and not just wished it.

  Fredo turned anguished eyes on him. ‘Wreckage. Everywhere only wreckage.’

  Conscience brushed Seppe. Hope for the Major’s death and you are no better than him. An owl hooted behind them in the copse that led back to Campo 61. The grass was dew-cool and soft against his cheek. He breathed, slow and steady, the whittling knife untouched in his pocket. Fredo’s torment washed over him, none of his own rising to meet it, not even, yet, worries about his mother. Only the realisation: I’m free.

  Old Tree Crashes across Road

  in Yorkley

  Last weekend brought wild, wet weather and one ‘casualty’ was an old beech tree near Oaken Hill Lodge, Yorkley, which crashed across the road on Sunday morning.

  Dean Forest Mercury, Friday, 1st December, 1944

  THE GROWING FAMILY

  A Mother’s Joy

  … A woman who is ( … ) constantly below-par, cannot possibly look after the home, her husband and children in an efficient manner. Suffer she may herself, but the greatest sufferers are those who are dependent upon her ministrations.

  Dean Forest Mercury, advertisement, 8th December, 1944

  Winter, 1944

  Thirty-Five

  December

  ‘SHUT THE DOOR, FRANK love, will you? It’s blowing a gale out there tonight. If December carries on like this, them trees’ll be bare before we know it.’

  Connie looked up from the dough she was kneading on Joyce’s kitchen table and grinned at Frank, stamping off the cold in the doorway. ‘He knows that, don’t you, boss? It won’t stop y
our husband, Joycie.’

  ‘Aye, well nobody can live here and mind the seasons changing, but that’s not to say I want winter in my kitchen. Bad enough keeping the fire stoked these days as it is.’ Joyce walked over to Frank and placed a careful kiss on his cheek, her floury hands held aloft either side of him like warning signs.

  ‘Get it all done, did you?’ Frank smiled at her.

  ‘As much as I needed to.’

  ‘What were you up to, anyway?’

  Connie bashed the dough with sullen knuckles, broke off a chunk and gave it to Joe. He’d probably stuff it straight in his gob, same as everything these days, but it couldn’t harm him; it was only uncooked bread.

  Frank wasn’t supposed to be out in the forest without her. He’d packed her off at lunchtime, same as usual on a Saturday. It’d been proper brass monkeys out there, but he’d better not have sent her home because it was cold. He must know she was made of sterner stuff than that.

  ‘You could have told me you were staying on; I’d have given you a hand.’

  Frank braced his palm against the lintel and heeled off his work boots. The smell of trees and sweat rose up and mingled with the pies already in the range. He roasted his hands on its lid, the cold coming off him like bombing raids.

  ‘I knew our Joyce was showing you how to make a game pie this afternoon. I wasn’t going to get in the way of that.’

  Connie glowered at the dough. It looked like it had given up all hope. She could have been out in the trees with Seppe instead of stuck in here, realising yet again what a rubbish housewife she’d make.

  ‘Give that here a minute.’ Joyce bustled over, removed the dulled scrap of misery from Connie’s hands and stretched it, one two three. Now it wasn’t a battered bit of shrapnel; it was a tarpaulin like the ones the army used on those trucks. Joyce was a bloody marvel.

  ‘What were you up to out there all this time?’

  ‘Planting new-growth. Spruce saplings needed going in now before the ground’s any harder. There’s been a wicked frost up there these last few nights.’

  ‘Wrong time of year for new-growth, ent it?’

  Frank shrugged out of his jacket, unwound his scarf and stuffed it into the pocket beside his cap. ‘It’s all topsy-turvy this year, love. Them quotas keep flooding in and after all that work this one here did with our Seppe, there’s new trees to plant.’

  ‘Already?’

  Frank came and sat beside Connie at the table, his elbows instantly dusted with flour.

  ‘Well, even spruce do take their time to get to felling size, and who knows how long this war will go on. Best to keep planting in the new ones now, even out of season, hope they’ll bed in some roots in time for the proper cold weather.’ Frank’s words were empty, like a wall that had been left standing with nothing behind it worth protecting.

  Joyce put a mug of tea in front of Frank and took Joe from Connie, hugged him to her. ‘I don’t know, Frank. It’s a right pickle this year, one way or another.’ She looked down, brushed a hand across her face. Connie shivered.

  Frank had noticed too. ‘What’s the matter, love? This isn’t like you.’

  ‘Oh, I’m being silly. It’s just – well, the trees going in at the wrong time of the year, and still no word from our Billy. It can’t be good, can it, Frank? I feel right at sixes and sevens today.’

  Connie’s cheeks were hot. Here she was mithering to herself about pastry and being allowed out to work when Joyce was worrying herself sick about Billy. Let’s face it, the odds were the poor sod wasn’t coming back. These forest folk kept their opinions close like nobody she’d ever met before, but that didn’t mean they weren’t feeling things. The forest itself warned them of loss even as they chopped it down. Bloody great gaps staring at them in the very woods that had sheltered them all their lives, and people pulled from this life into a new world that swallowed them up.

  ‘The trees will sort themselves out, Frank, won’t they?’ It came out imploringly.

  She turned to Joyce. ‘And Billy – listen, Joyce. No news is good news in this war, that’s what I’ve come to believe.’ She’d come to believe no such thing, but she could give Joyce this.

  Joyce sat up straight, stroked Joe’s head. ‘You’re right, Con, of course you’re right. It’s just – well, sometimes it do strike you, you know? Even the sight of you sitting there, where I taught our Billy to make them pies when he weren’t that much younger than you –’

  Connie reached her hand across. ‘I know.’ She swallowed hard. ‘You’ll get through, Joyce. I don’t know how, but you will. We all will.’

  Thirty-Six

  ‘SEPPE! THERE YOU ARE.’ Gianni was haloed by blurry cold, but rather than barrelling in to the sleeping hut as usual, he stood in the entrance as if he’d forgotten what he was doing. Without his smile he was faded.

  Seppe sat forward on his bunk and put down the knife and the wood, tugging the blanket closer around his shoulders against the night air.

  ‘What’s the matter? Aren’t you supposed to be at rehearsals for Seven Sweethearts?’

  There was the smile, albeit a diminished version. ‘There may not be a camp show this Christmas. Nobody will play a woman except me. We will need to rename it One Sweetheart.’ Gianni seemed to remember where he was, let the door go and came further in. Seppe heaved him up onto the bunk. The wooden frame, missing so many of its slats for use as benches in the theatre, creaked, swayed, held, and Seppe exhaled.

  ‘But I am not here to talk about my show-stopping brilliance, even if I will be stealing your sheets for my “wedding dress” before long.’ The joke had no weight behind it. He was really out of sorts; was he sick? Had he got ill? The chill had set in now, the nights colder than maybe Gianni knew from the south.

  Gianni shifted so that he was facing Seppe head on and Seppe stilled at the seriousness in the movement. ‘It’s Fredo. Have you seen him?’

  ‘What, today? No, but I have been felling, and then after dinner I came in here out of the way of the football and the theatricals.’ The images of Livorno still played across Seppe’s mind in every moment of solitude, and he craved them, sifted obsessively through their debris to discover the reason for his deadened response. He knew himself to be capable of emotion, had even tested this out by conjuring up an image of Joe snuggling up in the crook of his arm, warm and trusting, of Connie, head back, laughing, her fingers entwined in his. But when it came to Livorno, it was as if a connection had been severed, never to return. Once or twice he had considered sneaking back out to the cinema in the hopes that they’d show the same reel and maybe he’d be moved this time to a more human reaction to the images. What was wrong with him, that he was so callous?

  Gianni put a hand on Seppe’s knee. ‘I know you have had problems with Fredo before. I understand that. At the beginning – no. This would be too much. But now you are more, are stronger from this crazy place. And you and Fredo – you know each other from a long time ago, no? I think this is what he needs right now, someone who knows him. Someone who understands.’

  How to tell Gianni, who cried every time a letter arrived from home, that Seppe didn’t understand how anyone could feel attached to home, that he himself was even now poking at the wound of his destroyed city in an effort to make himself feel something other than unburdened?

  He couldn’t. Seppe patted Gianni on the leg and jumped down from the bunk. ‘I’ll go and talk to him. Where is he?’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’ Gianni had tears in his eyes. Seppe almost envied him this. ‘He is in the chapel.’

  ‘The chapel?’ Seppe hadn’t set foot in it since he had arrived, except to build benches before God and the rest of the prisoners had arrived. And last time he had seen a padre – well. Last time he had seen a padre had been when he enlisted.

  The camp was shrouded in cool dusk as he headed out from his barrack and across the parade ground towards the chapel. His mind looped back, thoughts of the padre and thoughts of Livorno colliding, bringing him
back to the evening his father had lost the council vote.

  But now his father wouldn’t ever threaten him again. Yet it wouldn’t sink in; he couldn’t trust it yet.

  There was a way to try to believe it, something he’d been avoiding, though Gianni had confirmed it for him, tears streaming with a sorrow Seppe knew he should be experiencing himself. The camp guards, not without some sympathy, had allowed the POWs to post up on the parade ground a list of casualties from the northern push, compiled haphazardly from accounts sent in from those few survivors.

  Men had congregated in front of it ever since it appeared, some unable to tear themselves away from the awful beauty of seeing their mothers’, their wives’, their children’s names in front of them in this foreign land, even as their presence confirmed the one thing they dreaded above all other. Those whose loved ones didn’t appear on the list rejoiced; but as time went on with no word from home they knew this rejoicing to be futile. Seppe had stayed away, not out of stubbornness or dread, but because to stand in front of the board and remain unmoved would be not only unforgivably insensitive but potentially also rashly dangerous. He hated himself for this instinct for self-preservation that kicked in even now, was deeply ashamed.

  In the bleak hollowness of impending frost, the crowd had dissipated. Seppe stepped away from the chapel and approached the board. It didn’t take long to find his parents’ names. Seppe stared at them, willing the emotion through. He noted the careful slant to the writing, the place in his mother’s name where the ink must have run dry and the scribe dipped the pen again in ink. He couldn’t make the words in front of him pierce to the emotion he knew he should feel.

  Seppe looked one last time. His father was not top of the list; this would displease him. Seppe smiled despite himself, then felt a stab of self-loathing, and made his way back to the chapel. Perhaps he could help Fredo even if he himself was condemned to damnation for being so callous.