Gull Island (12 page)

The sudden change of mood frightened her. Then the slight fear turned to flattery: he was simply afraid of losing her. She wasn’t vain, but knew how he had benefited from having her and Rosita sharing his life. His bad mood only lasted a few days but she was hesitant about asking again to visit her friends.

Rosita was a forward child and by the beginning of August, when she was eight months old, she was crawling and pulling herself up on chairs. Barbara was proud of her but exasperated too when she had to watch her every moment of the day. Rosita was unlike her mother, following the dark looks of Bernard, her dead father.

Despite Barbara’s efforts Rosita often escaped her care and disappeared, to be found in one of the barns or heading towards the duck pond, where fortunately Graham had erected a strong fence so she couldn’t get close. One evening, as Barbara was washing her ready for bed, she found bruising on her back and thighs.

‘Graham, look at this. What d’you think happened?’

‘You can hardly be surprised at a few injuries, Barbara. The child is always getting into places she shouldn’t be.’

‘But look. It’s lines, as if someone has beaten her with a stick. You don’t think that boy has been hurting her, do you?’

‘Could have been anything. I don’t think it looks like marks from a stick. Imagining things you are. Too anxious altogether.’

‘Graham, I’m going to speak to him. And if I don’t get a satisfactory explanation I’m going to the police. She’s a tiny helpless baby!’

‘All right. It was me.’ His voice was sharp as he turned his broad back to her. ‘It was me. I hit her.’

Barbara felt sickness sweep through her. ‘You hit my baby? But why?’

‘Come with me and I’ll show you.’ He led her to the barn. There in a corner was a circular saw and the choppers and sharp knives he used for cutting firewood and for making the swing he was shaping for Rosita. ‘This is where I found her this morning when you were collecting the eggs. I had to stop her coming here again. Imagine what could happen if she came with no one to stop her touching all this. She could be killed.’ He was watching Barbara’s face as he picked up the choppers and touched their sharp edges. Emotions passed through her mind, visible on her lovely face: anger, outrage, then fear and relief.

‘I love that little girl just like she’s my own. I’d die if anything terrible happened to her. I’d blame myself for ever. You must know that, Barbara. But however she’s punished, I’ll never smack her again, I promise.’

‘You really care for us?’

‘You know I do.’

‘If you so much as touch her again, I’ll leave.’

‘I never will, I promise.’

The war ended in November, when Germany surrendered
unconditionally
, but the world event made little difference to Barbara’s life. News was slow to reach the farm, where they rarely had time to listen to the wireless, and when it did, Barbara’s only concern was to wonder if Luke had survived it. She wanted to find out and the only chance of doing that was to visit the Careys.

Feeling confident in Graham’s growing affection, she asked if she might do so. She watched anxiously for his reaction but he didn’t put forward any
reason for not allowing the visit or put any obstacles in the way of her leaving for a few days.

Far more effectively, he pleaded for her to forget Luke and the Careys and think of life here, on the farm with him, where Rosita was happy and they were both so badly needed and loved. Without refusing, he had prevented her going.

When, on Christmas Day, Rosita’s birthday, he asked her to marry him, she accepted.

A
RRIVING IN
F
RANCE
in the spring of 1918, after alarmingly brief training, Luke had expected to have time to consider his plans for the future. The general opinion seemed to be that the Germans were on the run and all he would be doing was helping to mop up the remnants of a defeated army. It would give him moments of quiet and enable him to think of what he would do on returning home.

Breaking away from everything he knew would be an opportunity to take stock of his life. He needed time to accept the abandonment of his family and the loss of Barbara’s friendship and work out what he could expect from the years ahead.

Then he was confronted with the reality of war. Scenes seen in
newspapers
seemed so unreal in his safe office; articles he had perhaps only half-believed became horrifyingly real.

The small sections of battles seen in small photographs in newspapers and magazines gave no indication of the huge area over which hundreds of men fought and died. They didn’t begin to describe the pounding of shells and the explosions of earth and equipment that buried men in seconds, or the screams as dozens of shells came through the air and landed like rain, bringing death and destruction in moments.

He and the few friends he had begun to make were thrown into the
frenzied
effort to block the enormous counter-attack against the British by thousands of German soldiers brought from other war zones to push them back.

He found himself in the confusion of a battle which changed moment by moment, so he didn’t know where the frontline was or from which
direction
the Germans were coming, or even which direction he should himself be heading. At that terrifying time when he obeyed shouted orders and fired at human beings walking towards him in the grey uniform of the enemy, all he wanted was to survive. The future – if there were to be one – could look after itself.

There were times when fear such as he had never imagined made him
deaf to the commands of his officers, blind to anything except his own vulnerability. He was in a pit of lunacy. Dante’s Inferno, with mud the killer instead of flames, although there were flames too. These strange forms milling around him, dragging their feet through inches of thick, glutinous mud, covered with the filthy stuff so they no longer looked human, were escapees from a nightmare or an asylum. He was surrounded by maniacs glorying in death, creatures who wanted to kill and be killed.

He was afraid that every breath would be his last and besides the threat of death, there were the twin terrors of maiming wounds. Having left the dubious protection of the trench, he had crawled across land that no longer resembled good earth that had ever grown flowers and food. The stench of it choked him; the all-pervading filth clogged his nose and mouth and throat so he thought he must suffocate.

The noise of the bombardment deafened him and beat into his brain, so trying to think actually hurt, then became impossible. Besides the crump of falling shells, there was the screaming and whistling of their descent and the uproar came at him from every direction, adding to the confusion inside his head. He must be insane; he’d soon be a gibbering idiot. A punishment for saying he loved Roy. He was out of his mind. No one would accept this stupidity unless they were insane.

A crater opened out before him as he struggled forward and rather than make his way around it, he slid down into the depths, towards the
glutinous
watery mud at the bottom, where two shapes suggesting bodies lay still and half submerged. He slid well below the rim of the crater and holding his position on the slippery side with difficulty, he forced his shaking fingers to reload his rifle. Then he covered first his eyes then his ears with his filthy, stinking hands and tried to think. But there was no excuse for him to remain below the lip of the crater.

He could hardly see, and he knew it was mud, but his eyes stung and he believed he was going blind. He took off his glasses and tried to clean them but every inch of him was covered with slime and he only made them worse. It was like lifting lead, to pull his unwilling body back to where he could see the enemy and fire at them. He desperately wanted to stay hidden. Like many others, he called soundlessly for his mother.

While he fired his Lee-Enfield with manic intensity at the German soldiers who seemed to be approaching on all sides and increasing in number, his mind fretted hysterically with the problem of how he would row his boat with only one arm, or how he would get into it with one leg, or even with none.

Panic ate at him in waves and, in between, guilt made him ashamed of his fear. The others didn’t appear to be afraid. They went over the top when
ordered to without a sign of anxiety. His father had been right to be ashamed of him; he wasn’t a man. Locked in a prison for conscientious objectors, that’s where he should be, where his cowardice couldn’t create risks for others. He was letting everyone down, crouched in terror on the edge of this filthy shell hole, with only the bodies of two of the enemy for company.

Determinedly he stood up, tears streaming down his face, and looked across the mud to where a column of Germans were coming down a
hillside
between the stumps of trees that had once been verdant woodland. The men were sliding in the mud and unable, he thought, to aim with any
accuracy
. Telling himself he was safe, that he could stop them, he aimed at one of the leaders. His arm shook but he saw the man fall.

Moments later, almost an echo of his own actions, he felt a firm thud against his thigh. He had been hit. He wondered if it were a fatal wound and what it would feel like to die. He continued to fire for several minutes then there was another jarring impact and he fell, with a second bullet in his shoulder followed by another sharper, searing pain in his head.

He slowly crumpled and lay at the edge of the crater, the foul stuff inching its way to almost touch his mouth. His mind wandered and he dreamed of being on his boat with the wind touching his hair as the battle passed over and around him, until blissful silence came with the darkness of night.

Exhaustion made him lower his head and at once his nose began to fill with the slime and, coughing, he tried to get up. To his horror his legs were already half submerged. He gave a low scream, remembering seeing horses buried alive in the disgusting stuff. He managed to pull himself out of the glue-like grave and through that crazy night he crawled then stumbled and eventually walked away from the scene of battle.

He had no notion of time, nor of where he was heading, his animal instincts simply taking him away from the danger to where he might rest up and lick his wounds and cleanse himself of the mud and the sewer-stink of death.

He met no one although sometimes he heard distant sounds of activity and once a vehicle passed but, afraid it might be the enemy who would either kill him or commit him to prison, he hid. He slept when he could travel no further, under the remains of a hedge in the slight shallow of a drainage ditch, which was miraculously free of the filthy, clinging mud.

In the early dawn, when the silence was occasionally broken by distant gunfire, he opened his eyes on the smiling, impish face of a woman pressed close to his own.

‘’Ello, English boy. Do you think you can walk?’ She seemed satisfied by
his stuttered response as she looked over his shoulder and called, ‘
Papa ici, vite
.’ Her voice was husky and soothingly low. Behind him footsteps squelched slowly through knee-deep mud and an old man appeared, dressed in the rough clothes of a farmer.

‘I need to get back to my line,’ Luke said, but when he tried to stand, his head felt twice its normal size and his legs were unable to carry him. Cursing his weakness, he sank once more to the ground.

‘Do not worry,
mon petit
,’ the woman said. He wondered about the
mon petit
– it was an expression used for small children – but when he roused himself sufficiently to look at her, he realized that to her, he was petite. She weighed about three stone more than his ten and a half and was at least eight inches taller. She smiled widely and in English, said to her father, ‘I have found myself an Englishman, Papa. Now what shall we do with him, eh?’

‘
Pour commencer nous allons le metre sur pied
,’ the man replied with a chuckle. Luke understood that he wanted to get him on his feet and shared her cheerful smile.

Her clothes were brown, her face was brown, her eyes a darker version of that same colour. Her hair was an untidy mixture of brown and grey carelessly combed – if at all. Yet there was something very likeable about her. Even in those first moments of anxiety when he wondered if they would kill him or hand him over to the enemy, he recognized that she was a woman made for laughter and fun.

He stood with the old man’s arm supporting him and through blurred eyes looked around the desolate countryside, which was little more than charred and broken tree stumps, ruined buildings and endless acres of churned-up earth. If she could smile amid all this, hers must be a cheerful spirit indeed.

After a cursory examination of his wounds – a deep cut on his thigh, another less serious one, probably from flying shrapnel, across the side of his head, and a channel made by a bullet grazing his shoulder – the old man helped the woman to carry him across the slippery ground. It was exhausting in his weakened state and it seemed like forever before they eventually stopped in the protection of a half-demolished wall.

‘Ouf!’ the man exclaimed. He muttered something that Luke interpreted as, ‘He is heavier than he looks.’ Luke shared a smile with the woman.

He washed his glasses and immediately felt better. The woman held out her hand for them and dried them on her skirt, lifting her clothes carelessly and showing a generous expanse of sturdy thigh.

Unbelievably, he was in a small area that was not completely churned up. The farm and most of the animals had survived the fighting that had
surrounded them. The farmhouse that faced them was a little way up the slope they were about to climb and was half hidden by a fold in the land. Around it was a patch of green that dazzled after seeing nothing but
grey-brown
mud.

As they drew closer, Luke saw that the building was damaged; the roof had a large hole in it and the walls gaped where there had once been windows and doors. But from a chimney a thin column of smoke rose and it promised warmth and a place to rest. He was incapable of looking further into the future than to relish those two precious things.

After a wonderful bath, during which the woman walked in and out of the room without any unease, they found him some clean clothes, all of which were several sizes too large. Then they hid him in a barn of
sweet-smelling
hay, where a solitary horse munched contentedly close to his ear.

A few days later the fighting seemed to have moved further away and they took him into the house. An attic room, giving him a view across the once-green fields, was his home for a few more days while his wounds healed. All were grazing wounds without the complication of bullets embedded. The thigh was the worst but that too submitted to the woman’s expert ministrations.

The father moved around the buildings, feeding their few animals but spending a lot of his day just standing looking across the alien landscape, his deep-set eyes full of memories. Martine, his daughter, cooked and cleaned, fed the hens, singing all the time in a surprisingly mellow voice. He was reminded of the Careys, whose singing seemed an echo of hers.

When she had time to spare she would come and sit on the straw-filled mattress and talk to him in a mixture of French and English that had them both laughing within moments of her arrival. With deep regret, he left after a couple of weeks to try and find his way back to his group.

Luke survived the war with a scar on his shoulder and thigh and a patch of white hair where shrapnel had scorched his scalp – the only visible signs of his experience. But the worst scars were hidden, the memories of the hundreds of men he had seen die. The moans of their agony disturbed his sleep. When he returned home, he found it impossible to settle. He was constantly tormented by the faces of men he had killed – none of which he had actually seen. In his tormented mind he saw not wicked and cruel enemy soldiers, only young and innocent young men, like his friend, Roy Thomas.

On Christmas Day 1918 he was twenty-one and, having no family to share the occasion, he went to the cottage on the beach hoping for news of Barbara and Rosita. He broke the fresh padlock on the door and went
inside. Nothing had changed, his father hadn’t set foot in the place – just prevented him from enjoying it. He sighed and wondered why his father hated him so.

He walked across the beach to find his boat still intact and the Careys living in chaotic squalor in the beach house. He asked after Barbara and Rosita but there had been no news of them since they had moved away. Was it only months he had been gone? The reminder startled him; it seemed like a lifetime.

He noticed that the porch was still standing but the repair to the room above had not been carried out. The wood Richard had bought was still lying abandoned and the room still lacked a floor and a part of its front wall. The money Richard had ‘found’ and used had been wasted, the lethargic Henry Carey too idle to carry out the simple tasks. Any
improvements
in their living conditions were those achieved by Mrs Carey and Richard. He shrugged. The Careys survived in the place so why should he persuade them they needed more?

With Richard he went out in the boat and they fished unsuccessfully, content to talk. Luke dreaded the boy asking about the war, but tried to answer truthfully when he did, not glorifying the insane slaughter of a generation of men from many nations.

‘Were you scared, Luke?’ Richard asked when he was told about the day he was wounded. Here truth slipped swiftly away and Luke shook his head.