Grace Hardie (24 page)

‘I tried to telephone him. A clerk told me what he's doing these days. Drafting death warrants for people like me, it seems. And with a wife and baby, I can't expect him to harbour a criminal.'

‘I know so little of the world outside Oxford,' Grace confessed. There was a long silence whilst each of them considered the problem. When she spoke again, it was
with the tentative voice of someone who knows that a suggestion will be unwelcome.

‘It seems to me that the safest place for you would be in the army. Under another name, of course. That's the one place where the military police would never dream of looking for you. Could you consider such a plan? If you were to offer your services as a volunteer – perhaps with some story of being medically unfit until recently – you might be allowed some choice of sphere, like David. To serve as a stretcher bearer, perhaps.'

Kenneth's expression showed his distaste for the idea, ‘I think my only hope is to find work on a foreign ship. Once I'm out of England, I shall be all right. Until then –'

‘I brought you some money,' Grace told him. ‘It's all I have in the house. But I'm sure you'd be safe here for another day or two. I could take some more money from the shop.'

‘I wouldn't want you to steal for me, Grace.'

She couldn't help laughing. ‘An escaped convict like you, shocked that I might put my hand in the till! I work without wages because it's a family business, and because it's a family business it can surely be used to support a member of the family. I'll come again at this time tomorrow. And bring you clean clothes from your room as well. What else?'

‘Soap. And a haversack. Grace, can you understand? Could
you
kill a man?'

‘No. But it's not expected –'

‘Why not? Is there such a difference between men and women? We're all taught as children to hold life sacred. If as adults we grow up to hold differing views, it can only be because boys and girls are educated differently. But suppose that part of our education is deficient in some way. Then it can hardly be our own fault if we see life through eyes unlike our brothers'. A girl who asks for a
gun and kills with it is thought unwomanly; a boy who refuses to shoot is derided as unmanly. But we're not talking about crimes or sins; merely about conventions.' His fists clenched with anger. ‘Well, I mustn't burden you with my difficulties. Thank you for your help. And you'll come back tomorrow?'

‘Yes, of course.'

As Grace hurried through the darkness to the house she intended not only to keep her promise but to think of some way in which Kenneth could start a new life. So it came as an unpleasant shock when, returning laden to the plant room twenty-four hours later, she found it empty.

‘Kenneth!' she called quietly, first in the room and then outside it. There was no answer; no sound except for the rustling of the wind in the trees. Setting down the bundle of clothes and the pack full of food, she sat in the darkness for an hour, but he did not come. Had something happened to frighten him away – or, worse, had the military police watched her on the previous day and followed her to their quarry?

Grace took the money from her purse and pushed it into a pocket of the suit which Kenneth had worn as a young businessman. Then, unhappily, she returned to her room in the tower and went to bed. Very early next morning she ran down to the plant room. The clothes, the food and the money had gone. Kenneth had not trusted her; it was as simple as that.

Hurt and worried, she joined her mother at the breakfast table. ‘You've been crying,' she said, recognizing an unhappiness that matched her own.

‘I found it hard to sleep last night. It frightens me, the way the family is breaking up. Such a short time ago, your father and I and you and the boys … So happy together. I knew that it couldn't always be like that, of course. Still, I thought that even when you all married and had children
of your own, you'd keep coming back here. But now – Frank is dead. And your father – I find it harder each day to hope …'

She stopped, as though ashamed to break the convention by which every member of the family professed to be certain that Gordon Hardie's long silence was due only to a severed line of communication.

‘Every time I say goodbye to Philip, I'm terrified that I may never see him again,' she went on. ‘And now Kenneth. I say to myself that he can't simply disappear – but he can! I may have seen him for the last time. Without saying a proper goodbye; without knowing.' She dabbed with a handkerchief at the tears which were trickling down her cheeks, and then looked up. ‘Has he been here?'

Grace nodded.

‘And gone?'

‘Yes. He didn't say goodbye to me, either. But he'll come back, Mother. When the war is over, Greystones will pull them all back. Just by being here. It's our home.'

Even as she spoke, she knew that her words could carry little reassurance. Frank would never come home again. And her mother's fears for Philip were well justified. It was all too easy to believe that he might never return to their house on the hill.

Private Philip Hardie's life in the trenches was ruled by ritual. In this he was no different from his comrades, each of whom had private superstitions to be observed, talismans to be touched, runes to be repeated. It was the only way to cling to sanity and courage.

Every morning at the moment of sunrise he passed the same thought deliberately through his mind: that he was lucky to be alive. Lucky in that he had survived another night; lucky because almost all the other volunteers who had travelled to France on the same troop train as himself had been killed many months ago. On the day he forgot to recognize his good fortune and give conscious thanks for life, he would place himself at risk. Until then he was safe. That was his superstition.

His talisman rested in a breast pocket. Like many others he had faith that the slim New Testament supplied by a Bible charity would deflect any bullet from his heart. To be doubly sure, he kept inside its covers a photograph of his mother and sister on the terrace of Greystones. They were what he was fighting for – if the war had ever had any other purpose, he had lost sight of it by now. In Philip's world at school and university and in the army there had been no room for women. He was twenty-five years old, but had not yet fallen in love. The family was the rock to which he clung.

His most secret ritual was a legacy of his botanical training. Passchendaele in October 1917 was a lake of mud. For four months rain had been falling on the once-fertile countryside of Flanders, its drainage channels already
shattered by the shellfire of the opposing armies. The water had settled, and the ground beneath was pulverized by continuing bombardments; trenches became streams and no-man's-land was a sea of slime, pock-marked by craters in which it was easy for a weak or wounded man to drown. Long before the first frost signalled the beginning of an autumnal fall of leaves the trees were bare, their shattered trunks pointing accusing fingers up towards heaven.

‘In this mud-saturated environment Philip searched silently for traces of green. Each day he tried to find a trampled or floating root of grass which he could rescue and press into some less heavily trodden patch of earth, as though giving new life to a blade of grass could increase his own hope of survival.

There was no grass within sight on the night of 23 October. As darkness fell, he was sitting halfway up a hill in a pillbox captured from the enemy. Its concrete walls were more than three feet thick, so that its present occupants could listen with less anxiety than usual to the artillery bombardment which seemed set to continue throughout the night. But almost certainly the shelling meant that the Germans were planning a counter-attack at dawn. On their way to the British line they would have to pass the pillbox and, because they had built it themselves, there was no protection facing the direction from which they would come; only an open entrance. The men who were stretched on the floor, taking it in turns to attempt sleep, knew that dawn would spell danger.

So loud and so continuous was the bombardment that it might have seemed impossible to catch the sound of any new element in the pattern of shrieking flight and explosive blast. But Philip was not the only one who suddenly raised his head to listen more intently, holding his breath as though amidst the thunder of the guns a faint inhalation
would prove a barrier to hearing. Yes, there it was again; a thinner scream in flight, a duller thud on landing. A newcomer might have interpreted the sound as that of a mercifully unexploded shell, but an old hand knew better.

‘Gas!' he said quietly. There was a scuffling as his companions, like himself, made sure that their respirators were at hand. They would wait until the last moment before putting them on.

Without distracting the sentries who were watching for any movement of an approaching army, Philip went outside and, flattening himself against the wall of the pillbox, moved quietly round until he was looking down on his own lines. He lifted his head, feeling for the wind, and found that it was almost still. If the gas shells had burst behind the trenches, the heavy poison might linger in the dip instead of climbing the side of the hill towards them. But even as he prepared to report this conclusion, a new salvo of heavy artillery shells exploded below, their blast pushing the cloud of gas towards the pillbox.

For a second or two he waited and watched as new explosions revealed the tendrils of mist, unnaturally tinted to the colour of a Clouded Yellow butterfly, creeping up the hill. By the time he made his way back into cover a look-out in the trench below was beating an urgent warning on the empty shell case which served as an alarm gong. Already the air was tainted with a smell stronger than that of the corpses putrefying in the mud.

Time had taught Philip to control his fear of bullets and shell splinters, but imprisonment in a gas mask always brought him near to panic. The men who were his friends, the men who trusted him and on whom he in turn must rely, were transformed within seconds into unrecognizable, identical, goggle-eyed toads. The nose clip which forced him to breathe through his mouth made him feel as though he could not breathe at all, and the air so painfully pulled
through the filter was not like real air. It brought no strength, and every breath felt as though it might be the last, so great was the effort needed to fill his lungs. Still, there was no other protection on offer, and wearing the respirator would make the difference between life and death. He was as quick as the others to pull it on.

The use of gas confirmed what the bombardment had already suggested: that a counter-attack was imminent. The enemy was expected to sweep down the hill to the southern end of the newly-established British line in an attempt to re-occupy the hundred yards of land which they had lost a few days earlier. The occupants of the pillbox, reinforced by a detachment from the trenches further north, would emerge from behind the Germans and chase them until they were forced to turn and fight on two sides. It was not a plan in which Philip placed much faith; nor did he see any great benefit to be gained even from success. But the whole strategy of the war was incomprehensible to someone who was a mere cog in the fighting machine.

That was partly his own fault. As an educated man, a graduate, he had twice been offered and on a third occasion had been pressed hard to take the training which would earn him a commission. But unlike Frank, who was recognized as officer material on the day he volunteered, Philip had no wish to give the orders which would send men to their deaths. An unendurable life could best be endured in the ranks. He had refused all promotion.

The sound of the German artillery underwent a subtle change. Although still as fierce as ever, the range had altered. Every man in the pillbox was an expert on trajectories and blasts and could interpret the slightest grace-note in an orchestral score which was played fortissimo throughout. The attack had begun. They waited in the darkness while lines of low-stooping Germans, as though operating to the British plan, ran past them down the hill. What
could the occupants of a few pillboxes hope to achieve by attacking from the rear? Nevertheless, the men obeyed instructions, grouping themselves ready for the downhill dash as they watched for the Very light which would signal them to move.

The Germans were expecting them. The bullet which had Philip's name on it hit him in the throat while he was zig-zagging between huge mud-filled craters. Its force spun him round before he fell dizzily forward on to his hands and knees. He could no longer breathe through his mouth, as the respirator forced him to do, and he tore the mask off to free his nose, not caring that the muddy ground was carpeted by the heavy gas. His lungs were bursting; he must breathe something, anything.

There was a moment in which he was aware of every separate part of his body as though it belonged to someone else: his head, thick with pain and incomprehension; his throat, bubbling as it spewed out blood; his lungs, on fire; his legs, inexplicably devoid of strength, as if they were made of melted wax. With a single deep sigh he brought all these pains together and abandoned himself to them. There was just time for him to realize with relief that he was escaping from hell at last.

Christmas was approaching before Grace and her mother, after weeks of anxiety, were able to visit Philip in a Berkshire hospital; for so great were his injuries that he had not for many weeks been judged fit to endure the cross-Channel journey. Their first glimpse did little to reassure them. He was alive, certainly, but that was all that could be said. Propped by pillows into a sitting position, he remained motionless, his eyes closed and his face pale and strained. To breathe was painful and not to breathe was death. Grace recognized the signs of mental strain as well as physical suffering.

But what caused her to gasp with horror was the tube protruding from his throat. At the sound he opened his eyes. Unable to speak or even to smile, he did at least manage to move a hand so that his mother could take it. The two visitors sat down at the side of his bed and talked of their happiness at seeing him alive and their love and hopes for him – dividing the conversation between themselves since it was clear that Philip could not contribute to it. They told him all the family news of the past few weeks before the nurse appeared again to clear the tube and tell them that the patient must not be tired by too long a visit.