The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (25 page)

‘Stop it!' Mary cried once more across the shadows. ‘
Nein
, I tell you!
Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn
.'

But
it was a fact. A woman who had missed these things could still be useful – more useful than a man in certain respects. She thumped like a paviour through the settling ashes at the secret thrill of it. The rain was damping the fire, but she could feel – it was too dark to see – that her work was done. There was a dull red glow at the bottom of the destructor, not enough to char the wooden lid if she slipped it half over against the driving wet. This arranged, she leaned on the poker and waited, while an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life. She leaned forward and listened, smiling. There could be no mistake. She closed her eyes and drank it in. Once it ceased abruptly.

‘Go on,' she murmured, half aloud. ‘That isn't the end.'

Then the end came very distinctly in a lull between two rain-gusts. Mary Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth and shivered from head to foot. ‘
That
's all right,' said she contentedly, and went up to the house, where she scandalized the whole routine by taking a luxurious hot bath before tea, and came down looking, as Miss Fowler said when she saw her lying all relaxed on the other sofa, ‘quite handsome'!

The first vision, then, concerns the back view of the Sheldrake Road, which, as you know, butts on to the railway embankment near Dalston Junction station. If you are of an adventurous turn of mind you shall accompany me, and we will creep up on to the embankment together and look down into these back yards. (We shall be liable to a fine of £2, according to a bye-law of the Railway Company, for doing so, but the experience will justify us.)

There are twenty-two of these small buff-brick houses huddled together in this road, and there is surely no more certain way of judging not only the character of the individual inhabitants but of their mode of life than by a survey of these
somewhat pathetic yards. Is it not, for instance, easy to determine the timid, well-ordered mind of little Miss Porson, the dressmaker at number nine, by its garden of neat mud paths, with its thin patch of meagre grass, and the small bed of skimpy geraniums? Cannot one read the tragedy of those dreadful Alleson people at number four? The garden is a wilderness of filth and broken bottles, where even the weeds seem chary of establishing themselves. In fact, if we listen carefully – and the trains are not making too much noise – we can hear the shrill crescendo of Mrs Alleson's voice cursing at her husband in the kitchen, the half-empty gin bottle between them.

The methodical pushfulness and practicability of young Mr and Mrs Andrew MacFarlane is evident at number fourteen. They have actually grown a patch of potatoes, and some scarletrunners, and there is a chicken-run near the house.

Those irresponsible people, the O'Neals, have grown a bed of hollyhocks, but for the rest the garden is untidy and unkempt. One could almost swear they were connected in some obscure way with the theatrical profession.

Mrs Abbot's garden is a sort of playground. It has asphalt paths, always swarming with small and not too clean children, and there are five lines of washing suspended above the mud. Every day seems to be Mrs Abbot's washing day. Perhaps she ‘does' for others. Sam Abbot is certainly a lazy, insolent old rascal, and such always seem destined to be richly fertile. Mrs Abbot is a pleasant ‘body', though.

The Greens are the swells of the road. George Green is in the grocery line, and both his sons are earning good money, and one daughter has piano lessons. The narrow strip of yard is actually divided into two sections, a flower-garden and a kitchen-garden. And they are the only people who have flowerboxes in the front.

Number eight is a curious place. Old Mr Bilge lives there. He spends most of his time in the garden, but nothing ever seems to come up. He stands about in his shirt-sleeves, and with a circular paper hat on his head, like a printer. They say he was formerly a corn merchant, but has lost all his money. He keeps the garden very neat and tidy, but nothing seems to grow.
He stands there staring at the beds, as though he found their barrenness quite unaccountable.

Number eleven is unoccupied, and number twelve is Mrs Ward's.

We come now to an important vision, and I want you to come down with me from the embankment and to view Mrs Ward's garden from inside, and also Mrs Ward as I saw her on that evening when I had occasion to pay my first visit.

It had been raining, but the sun had come out. We wandered round the paths together, and I can see her old face now, lined and seamed with years of anxious toil and struggle; her long bony arms, slightly withered, but moving restlessly in the direction of snails and slugs.

‘Oh dear! Oh dear!' she was saying. ‘What with the dogs, and the cats, and the snails, and the trains, it's wonderful anything comes up at all!'

Mrs Ward's garden has a character of its own, and I cannot account for it. There is nothing very special growing – a few pansies and a narrow border of London Pride, several clumps of unrecognizable things that haven't flowered, the grass patch in only fair order, and at the bottom of the garden an unfinished rabbit-hutch. But there is about Mrs Ward's garden an atmosphere. There is something about it that reflects in her placid eye the calm, somewhat contemplative way she has of looking right through things, as though they didn't concern her too closely. As though, in fact, she were too occupied with her own inner visions.

‘No,' she says in answer to my query. ‘We don't mind the trains at all. In fact, me and my Tom we often come out here and sit after supper. And Tom smokes his pipe. We like to hear the trains go by.'

She gazes abstractedly at the embankment.

‘I like to hear things… going on and that. It's Dalston Junction a little further on. The trains go from there to all parts, right out into the country they do… ever so far… My Ernie went from Dalston.'

She adds the last in a changed tone of voice. And now perhaps we come to the most important vision of all – Mrs Ward's vision of ‘my Ernie'.

I ought perhaps to mention that I had never met ‘my Ernie'. I can only see him through Mrs Ward's eyes. At the time when I met her, he had been away at the War for nearly a year. I need hardly say that ‘my Ernie' was a paragon of sons. He was brilliant, handsome, and incredibly clever. Everything that ‘my Ernie' said was treasured. Every opinion that he expressed stood. If ‘my Ernie' liked anyone, that person was always a welcome guest. If ‘my Ernie' disliked anyone they were not to be tolerated, however plausible they might appear.

I had seen Ernie's photograph, and I must confess that he appeared a rather weak, extremely ordinary-looking young man, but then I would rather trust to Mrs Ward's visions than the art of any photographer.

Tom Ward was a mild, ineffectual-looking old man, with something of Mrs Ward's placidity but with nothing of her strong individual poise. He had some job in a gasworks. There was also a daughter named Lily, a brilliant person who served in a tea-shop, and sometimes went to theatres with young men. To both husband and daughter Mrs Ward adopted an affectionate, mothering, almost pitying attitude. But with ‘my Ernie', it was quite a different thing. I can see her stooping figure, and her silver-white hair gleaming in the sun as we come to the unfinished rabbit-hutch, and the curious wistful tones of her voice as she touches it and says:

‘When my Ernie comes home…'

The War to her was some unimaginable but disconcerting affair centred round Ernie. People seemed to have got into some desperate trouble, and Ernie was the only one capable of getting them out of it. I could not at that time gauge how much Mrs Ward realized the dangers the boy was experiencing. She always spoke with conviction that he would return safely. Nearly every other sentence contained some reference to things that were to happen ‘when my Ernie comes home'. What doubts and fears she had were only recognizable by the subtlest shades in her voice.

When we looked over the wall into the deserted garden next door, she said:

‘Oh dear! I'm afraid they'll never let that place. It's been
empty since the Stellings went away. Oh, years ago, before this old war.'

Mr Stelling was a watchmaker, and he came from a place called Bremen. It was a very sad story, Mrs Ward told me. They had only been over here for ten months when Mr Stelling died, and Mrs Frow Stelling and the boys went back to Germany.

During the time of the Stellings' sojourn in the Sheldrake Road it appeared that the Wards had seen quite a good deal of them, and though it would be an exaggeration to say that they ever became great friends, they certainly got through that period without any unpleasantness, and even developed a certain degree of intimacy.

‘Allowing for their being foreigners,' Mrs Ward explained, ‘they were quite pleasant people.'

On one or two occasions they invited each other to supper, and I wish my visions were sufficiently clear to envisage those two families indulging this social habit.

According to Mrs Ward, Mr Stelling was a kind little man with a round fat face. He spoke English fluently, but Mrs Ward objected to his table manners.

‘When my Tom eats,' she said, ‘you don't hear a sound – I look after that! But that Mr Stelling… Oh dear!'

The trouble with Mrs Stelling was that she could only speak a few words of English, but Mrs Ward said ‘she was a pleasant enough little body', and she established herself quite definitely in Mrs Ward's affections for the reason that she was so obviously and so passionately devoted to her two sons.

‘Oh, my word, though, they do have funny ways – these foreigners,' she continued. ‘The things they used to eat! Most peculiar! I've known them eat stewed prunes with hot meat!'

Mrs Ward repeated, ‘Stewed prunes with hot meat!' several times, and shook her head, as though this exotic mixture was a thing to be sternly discouraged. But she acknowledged that
Mrs Frow Stelling was in some ways a very good cook; in fact, her cakes were really wonderful, ‘the sort of thing you can't ever buy in a shop'.

About the boys there seemed to be a little divergence of opinion. They were both also fat-faced, and their heads were ‘almost shaved like convicts'. The elder one wore spectacles and was rather noisy, but ‘My Ernie liked the younger one. Oh yes, my Ernie said that young Hans was quite a nice boy. It was funny the way they spoke, funny and difficult to understand.'

It was very patent that between the elder boy and Ernie, who were of about the same age, there was an element of rivalry which was perhaps more accentuated in the attitude of the mothers than in the boys themselves. Mrs Ward could find little virtue in this elder boy. Most of her criticism of the family was levelled against him. The rest she found only a little peculiar. She said she had never heard such a funny Christian name as Frow. Florrie she had heard of, and even Flora, but not
Frow
. I suggested that perhaps Frow might be some sort of title, but she shook her head and said that that was what she was always known as in the Sheldrake Road, ‘Mrs Frow Stelling'.

In spite of Mrs Ward's lack of opportunity for greater intimacy on account of the language problem, her own fine imaginative qualities helped her a great deal. And in one particular she seemed curiously vivid. She gathered an account from one of them – I'm not sure whether it was Mr or Mrs Frow Stelling or one of the boys – of a place they described near their home in Bremen. There was a narrow street of high buildings by a canal, and a little bridge that led over into a gentleman's park. At a point where the canal turned sharply eastwards there was a clump of linden-trees, where one could go in the summer-time, and under their shade one might sit and drink light beer, and listen to a band that played in the early part of the evening.

Mrs Ward was curiously clear about that. She said she often thought about Mr Stelling sitting there after his day's work. It must have been very pleasant for him, and he seemed to miss this luxury in Dalston more than anything. Once Ernie, in a friendly mood, had taken him into the four-ale bar of the Unicorn at the corner of the Sheldrake Road, but Mr Stelling
did not seem happy. Ernie acknowledged afterwards that it had been an unfortunate evening. The bar had been rather crowded, and there was a man and two women who had all been drinking too much. In any case, Mr Stelling had been obviously restless there, and he had said afterwards:

‘It is not that one wishes to drink only…'

And he had shaken his fat little head, and had never been known to visit the Unicorn again.

Mr Stelling died quite suddenly of some heart trouble, and Mrs Ward could not get it out of her head that his last illness was brought about by his disappointment and grief in not being able to go and sit quietly under the linden-trees after his day's work and listen to a band.

‘You know, my dear,' she said, ‘when you get accustomed to a thing it's
bad
for you to leave it off.'

When poor Mr Stelling died, Mrs Frow Stelling was heartbroken, and I have reason to believe that Mrs Ward went in and wept with her, and in their dumb way they forged the chains of some desperate understanding. When Mrs Frow Stelling went back to Germany they promised to write to each other. But they never did, and for a very good reason. As Mrs Ward said, she was ‘no scholard', and as for Mrs Frow Stelling, her English was such a doubtful quantity, she probably never got beyond addressing the envelope.

‘That was three years ago,' said Mrs Ward. ‘Them boys must be eighteen and nineteen now.'