by Thomas Wood
“You need to get your strength back up, you’re skin and bone!”
This was my mother’s favourite saying, it always had been, but now she was right. I was losing weight quicker than a stone sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
But I couldn’t eat. Every mouthful was another helping of guilt. Why had I survived? What had I done to be deemed by the Almighty as worthy of being saved?
I was no different to many of those boys, in fact I had less to live for than them. They had families, wives, children to go back to, to provide for. Instead their families would live on a widow’s payoff from the government, while I was free to walk about on the streets.
The disgrace I felt at being alive was overwhelming. I was a coward.
“Dad, I need help,” I pleaded as I wasted another afternoon in the armchair staring at the mantelpiece. It was a horrid thing, the mantelpiece, it contained photographs of me from early childhood right up to when I qualified on gliders. At least it did until I smashed it under my boot one evening; Mum had hidden it from me somewhere after that.
He barely looked up from his second reading of the day’s newspaper as I begged with him earnestly.
“Dad, how do I cope?”
He waited a moment or two, presumably finishing the article about Churchill that he had tried to talk to me about earlier. He loved Mr Churchill, something about saving the nation, but I couldn’t stand the man. He had sent me to war. He had done this to me.
He cleared his throat as he folded the paper over the arm of his chair.
“Grab your coat son, we’re going out.”
I followed him down the street, a couple of paces behind him as he stretched his legs further with every stride. His pace picked up the closer we got, like I used to the closer we got to the sweet shop. But the stiffness in my leg kept me at a sobering, slow limp.
He almost brought the pub to a standstill as he clattered in, but before long the patrons had forgotten the madman who bashed his way in, a younger man staggering slowly behind him. They must have written us off as a couple of drunks.
He ordered two half-pints of bitter and walked us both over to a resting point.
He nudged mine over to my side willingly, with a gentle smile and a wink.
“Get it down you mate, it’ll make you feel better, I promise.”
He wasn’t wrong. Before he’d taken another sip, my glass was empty, and he flicked the two glasses round like a trickster, so that my glass was the full one. He gave a sympathetic smile, the sort you give someone as they sob at the loss of a loved one, and you haven’t got a clue what to say.
Smiles are fascinating, interesting things, and, although I didn’t feel like smiling myself, I needed that smile from my Dad. The human face is an incredibly powerful tool, the slightest change in it can anger and annoy or encourage and reconcile. And that one, from my Dad, in that very brief moment, had pulled me back from the cliff edge, a momentary respite I so desperately needed.
I supped more slowly on my second one, watching as the dark, amber liquid resettled again after each taste. Dad watched with me. As I reached the end of my glass, he began to croak.
“I…I don’t…” he said as I looked up at him with an inquisitive eye, “get over it, I mean. I never will.”
His eyes were bleary as tears began to well up in them.
“You won’t either.” I expected those words to be accompanied by a stomach churning wrench, like a boxer had just thumped me in the pit of my stomach, but none of that came. If anything, I was feeling relieved, the tension dissipated.
I had wanted to get over this, I had wanted to forget what I had seen but I knew it was ingrained deep within me. I would never forget it.
But somehow knowing that someone else would never get over it, made me feel better, like I wasn’t alone, a sort of selfish boasting.
His speech was slow, well thought out, like he was forcing me to digest each syllable, before continuing onto the next.
“They’re not all evil Johnny…Not all of them are ruthless killers.” His speech was more confident, like he knew this for a fact and I desperately wanted to know why he felt like that. But this conversation was about me, not him, however selfish that may sound.
I longed to know what had happened to him, to know why he would say such a thing about men who had scarred his body and traumatised his mind.
“The dreams, I still have them. The scars, I still have them too, physical and mental. I know I’ll never be rid of them.”
He let the words sink in for a moment or two before he let out a grunt, accompanied by a straining expression on his face, as he returned to the bar for another round of drinks.
“I used to come in here a lot at first. It helps take the edge off, you know? Helps to reorder the thoughts in your brain.”
I nodded as if I knew exactly what he was on about, but my experiences with alcohol had the complete opposite effect on my thought processes. Charlie had been the same. We’d once set fire to a hay bale sat in the middle of a field because Charlie had thought it was a good idea after a few drinks.
I couldn’t see how drinking would make anything clear in anyone’s head, never mind the things that were zipping through mine.
He was permanently hunched forwards in his chair, no over exaggerated sighs as he leant back like any other Dad imparting advice. This was different from normal fatherly advice, this was advice that no one else in this pub deserved to hear. I couldn’t work out if it was this that was making him slope forwards, or the excruciating agony he might feel if he was to lean backwards.
“You won’t ever get over it mate. Your mum thinks I am, that I have the occasional dream, the occasional flashback, but she doesn’t know the half of it. Every single day I question myself over why I wasn’t killed. I ask whether I’ve done enough in my life since to justify the fact that I lived.”
He looked at me for a response.
“I don’t think I have.” I couldn’t do anything but sit and stare at my glass. I’d spent hours doing it before, observing the smoothness of the glass, the way that the liquid inside sloshed around like a tornado as I swirled it. But this time it was different, I felt further away from myself every minute.
“We can’t tell people, son,” he repressed a sob and passed it off as a belch as he got a few looks, “‘scuse me,” he chuckled, raising an apologetic hand.
“They don’t know what it’s like,” he said nodding towards the other attendees at the bar, “they never will, but they expect us to be proud, proud of ourselves and proud of our mates. But it’s…it’s difficult.”
“They’ll never know what it’s like and you’ll…you’ll struggle to cope with that, but you’ll have times that you are so intensely happy that it was you that did it, and not them.”
He let a few minutes pass before he spoke up again. I could tell he enjoyed talking to me in this way, he had felt like this for more than twenty years. I was the first person he was able to talk to that had a vague understanding of what he had seen and done, and even then, I didn’t have a clue. It was all just a story to me, like mine would be a story to him.
He sighed as he tried to flick himself from an unstable, emotional soldier, to a fully functioning, normal husband again. Before he fully made the transition however, he piped up one final time.
“We’ve all just got to tackle our demons head on. Face up to them, you know? We shouldn’t hide them to ourselves. We shouldn’t pretend that they’re not there.” He spoke with such a conviction, such authority, that I struggled to comprehend how a man so tough had suffered within himself, for this long.
He was off and up, tapping the table as he did, encouraging me to drink up and follow him. I did as I was told and scurried across the pub to catch up with him.
“See ya Frank,” called the landlord as we reached the door, and with a flick of the hand in response, we headed for home.
We’ve just got to tackle our demons, head on.
I lay awake on my bed th
at night, a welcome change from sitting bolt upright in the armchair. It was the first time I had brought myself to lie on my back since that night.
I couldn’t sleep as usual, but I felt a tranquillity come over me, a relaxed air surrounded me. I felt reassured, my mind was still all over the place and I knew that, like the world, peace cannot ensue unless there are no wars, but at least, there was a cessation of war, at least in my mind, and the façade of peace came to the fore, just for one night.
I needed to face up to my problems, to come to terms with what had happened and to try and return to society, like a normal person. Besides, I hadn’t been discharged yet and I certainly wasn’t going to be allowed to take leave indefinitely, one day I would have to return to the war.
I was haunted by Charlie. I had got away, and he hadn’t. I needed to face up to him, I needed to be able to tell myself that he knew there was nothing I could do for him. He needed to know that I had not chosen to be the one to survive.
But Charlie was dead. How could I face up to a dead man? How could I possibly talk to him?
I lay for a few hours more, thinking about that night, but for once I stayed where I was. I had a memory of it, but I wasn’t actually reliving it.
Suddenly, a thought came to me, and I knew exactly how to face up to it.
And, with that, for the first time in a long time, I fell asleep.
6
August 1944
The deep throbbing sensation, that sent pulsations up your body through the ground returned to me as I entered the village. It was a noise that I hadn’t heard for a long time now, but one that I instantly recognised and one that I was strangely at peace with.
It felt good to be back down in Dorset. There was an atmosphere of cleanliness here, the freshness of the air was fresher than the air at home. It made me feel free and replenished. I felt good, these last few nights as I prepared to travel down I had slept and slept well at that. I hadn’t had any dreams in anticipation of what was to come. I felt peaceful, I felt positive.
I knew that it probably wouldn’t last, but, for the first time since leaving the havoc of France, I felt like my old self again. I felt like if I walked a few miles back in the direction I’d just come from, I could negotiate my way back in, and secure myself a few bottles of whiskey in the process.
I had hopped off the bus a mile away, deciding that walking the last little bit would do me the world of good. I stood at the crest of the hill that gently sloped downwards and into the sleepy little village. It was like there was no war here, as if a few months ago this part of the country hadn’t been swarming with men, men from all over the world; Britain, America, Canada, India, the list was as long as my arm.
The idyllic scene that lay before me, the quaint, quiet English village, boxed in by dry stone walls as they marked out the surrounding fields, helped to steady my mind considerably. It was then that I decided this is where I belonged, where I would live.
The pulsations throbbed back up into my chest again as another engine came within reach of my hearing. I couldn’t see it, and in a way, I found myself wishing that I couldn’t, but I knew that somewhere near, another Halifax bomber was coming in to land, probably in preparation for another training mission.
It was a fantastic beast, the Halifax. Powered by four, seemingly unstoppable engines, I had spent many hours towed behind them as they took us to our target for the day. The Halifax crews would treat each sortie with the utmost severity and professionalism, but on more than one occasion we had shared hand gestures with the rear gunner while he sat, bored and alone.
RAF Tarrant Rushton was just a few miles away. It had been my home for the last two years and I had loved every minute of it. I was good at what I did and that meant that I could get away with almost anything on the base.
Acquiring things that other people require had always come naturally to me, whether it was acquiring things legally or not. Being placed on a military base made the demand for someone like me incredibly high, and consequently I had a lot of friends. On the other hand, I had made myself plenty of enemies too as I took advantage of lax security and easily persuaded quartermasters.
For the first time in ages, I found myself smirking at a happy memory, to no one in particular, as the tremor caused by the Merlin engine subsided as it began to shut down. But it was quickly replaced by a very different kind of vibration.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
My hands quivered as I released the brass door knocker after I’d given it a few short, sharp taps. The housing piece of the knocker was in the shape of a lion, its mouth gripping tightly to the handle itself. I found myself staring at it intently, as if I’d never seen something so outrageous and marvellous in my life.
The lion was replaced by a woman, a young woman. She was just as beautiful as he had told me, and more so. He always had a humbler approach to things than I did, and she was one thing that I would struggle to remain humble about.
She was smaller than I had imagined, Charlie had often told me how she came up shorter in comparison to him, but I had always thought it was his own unique way of teasing her a little bit, even if she wasn’t with him to respond.
She had a kind face, the sort of face you knew that she would be welcoming and sweet in any situation, which was good news for me, because I had just turned up on her doorstep uninvited. Despite that though, her eyes were ferocious, glinting green in the now-fading sunlight. She had a kind atmosphere about her, a calming character, but her eyes gave her away as one that could be fierce and fiery if she needed to be, used to standing up for herself against all the odds.
I could feel the warmth of the dipping sun gently kiss my neck, and the orangey hues of the fading daylight only served to highlight her beauty, as she eyed me up and down, profiling me in much the same way as I had done to her.
The qualities that I had deduced from her face had only taken me a couple of seconds of looking at her, she was captivating. I could see how Charlie had fallen for her so easily, every part of her gave something away, something more intriguing than the last.
They had met down here, in Dorset, after Charlie had pursued her after getting a glimpse of her at a local dance. He had seen her, but not for long and we left the dance soon after, making Charlie, uncharacteristically, sneak off the base to see if he would be able to track her down. In the creepiest act of romance that I had ever heard of, he had managed to find her and quite soon after, Charlie had started to wear a wedding band on his ring finger every time I saw him.
It hadn’t taken very long to find her, it was a relatively small village and it turned out she was quite well known in the area, so was Charlie it seemed. The greengrocer was more than happy to point me in the direction of her house, without even asking who I was. The “Careless Talk Costs Lives” poster and the figures looking out at the observer looked hilariously out of place in his shop.
She broke the deadlock, clearly growing impatient at the ensuing silence on her doorstep.
“John,” it was a statement of fact more than an inquisitive remark, almost like she had been waiting in all day for me. A minute or two must have passed before she spoke again.
“Come in, please,” she spoke softly, as if I was a child and, as she turned and shuffled down the hallway, I realised that the tone of her voice matched her face perfectly.
She busied herself making me a cup of tea before placing it on a table stationed to the left of the arm. She took a chair on the opposite side of the room, facing the fireplace. I could just about hear the wireless crackling away in what I assumed was the kitchen, and the constant ticking of the clock above the fireplace was incessant.
The scratching nib of the clock began to irritate me, and the involuntary tapping of my fingernails on the arm of the chair began in earnest. I needed to cut away from it, move my mind away from the ticking and focus on something else.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I thought of Charlie, how would he feel knowing that I was sat in his armchair, in his h
ome? Would he have been pleased to know that I had made an effort with his wife? Or would an intense burning of jealousy be raging up in him? I concluded that I would probably find out when I went to bed.
I sat for a while, unable to speak. How did this work? How was this woman, this stranger, going to help rid me of my nightmares and get my life back on track? This woman had been widowed, at a young age too, and here I was thinking just of my situation once more.
To me, it felt like only a few minutes had passed but the darkness of the sky told me plainly that I had been sat here for quite some time.
“I’m just going to check on the baby, I won’t be a minute.”
This was the third or fourth time that she had said this now, each time I responded with an even longer silence than the last. My uneasiness of the whole situation began to grow, especially after I found myself staring at a yellowing wedding veil, that was draped rather ceremoniously across the front window of the house.
She re-entered the room, this time wrapped up tightly in a dressing gown, I’d clearly outstayed my welcome. I suddenly felt intensely stupid. I had wasted my only opportunity. But only because I didn’t know what to say, I hadn’t thought it through at all. I had just expected her to say something, do something that meant that my head would be fixed forever. Forgiveness, maybe? A hug? I hadn’t done the right thing.
Silently, I got up to leave.
“Stay?” she said, quietly at first, but she became more confident with the next, “Stay the night?”
I stood, with an obvious perplexed look on my face.
“Up the stairs, on the right, the spare room. He’d always wanted you to come and visit.”
She spoke sympathetically, not entirely how I’d expected a twenty-two-year-old widow to react to this situation, especially at such a late hour as it now was.