Into the Blizzard (23 page)

There was a story that Cluny Macpherson, the Newfoundland Regiment’s doctor, told of Prince John. In 1911, Macpherson oversaw the laying of the first stone of the King George V Seamen’s Institute in St John’s. The laying of this stone was to be done on the day of the King’s coronation in London. The governor of Newfoundland, Ralph Williams, was to read aloud a proclamation from the King. Cluny Macpherson thought about this and wondered if the King himself could lay the stone. The King, on his way to his coronation, could press a button in Buckingham Palace and send an electric signal through the Anglo-American underwater sea cable, a signal that would jolt a mechanism that laid this first stone. The button could be anywhere, reasoned Cluny—even hidden in a wall as the King walked to his coronation.

The Palace, to the amazement of Ralph Williams, agreed to this plan.

The night before the coronation, it rained heavily in St John’s. In a trial run the next morning, the mechanism for laying the stone malfunctioned. Macpherson raced to a corner store and bought a ten-pound tub of butter and liberally applied the butter to all the mechanisms except for the electrical ones. He got the contraption working again just as the coronation began. A gong had been set up to go off when
the stone was laid. As the governor said a few words, the gong sounded—and to everyone’s relief, the stone was laid.

A few years later, Ralph Williams was in England to meet the King and young Prince John came in. You were the Governor of Newfoundland? he asked.

Ralph Williams said he was.

I saw the button, Prince John said, and wondered—what if I had pressed it beforehand? Would it have worked?

Ralph Williams said he didn’t know; only Cluny Macpherson knew the answer to that question.

Now I was standing before the grave of this young Prince, the boy who probably did push the button at his father’s coronation—the boy who had died the day before Tommy Ricketts was invested with the Victoria Cross.

After visiting the church, I tried to leave Sandringham, but there was now a crush of people lining the roads. Buses are leaving at half three, a driver told me. You could try walking to Derbyshire and finding a bus there. So I started for Derbyshire, but then thought: What am I fighting against?

I returned to Sandringham for leek soup and fried haddock. I took it easy. I observed people waving Union Jacks with “I saw the flame” printed in black on the red horizontal bar. And I thought of Thomas Ricketts having his breakfast in the King’s study. The red upholstery.

The King had been staying at York. The Queen was notified of Prince John’s death and the King was sent for.
They had a cry. The Queen wrote of her sadness at her son’s death. Then the next morning Thomas Ricketts entered the ballroom and was invested with the Victoria Cross in what is now the saloon. He shook hands with Sir Dighton Probyn on his way out. The King remarked, One of the oldest surviving winners of the Victoria Cross has just met the very youngest.

Back in London, at the Swiss Cottage youth hostel, I did a load of washing. My jacket and jeans were stiff with sweat. I thought about how the men in the regiment had boiled their clothes to kill the nits, and sometimes wore their shirts inside out until the lice crawled around to the other side.

I emailed home. My father had good news: I had received an either-sex caribou licence, in the area that I like. So I’d be hunting in the fall.

I walked from the South Kensington tube stop to the Ritz, looking for a spot to eat, but I couldn’t settle on any of the shiny flanks of modern buildings. It would be like eating in a bank. At Sainsbury’s I picked out a sandwich, a pop and bag of chips for three pounds. Just to tide me over, I thought, but soon it seemed this was what I would have
for dinner. I ate en plein air.
Esprit de corps
! I thought, to cheer myself up.

In the morning I ate the hostel breakfast and purchased from a teller an eight-pound travel card. It felt strange to be whizzing about on trains again, after days of biking. A lot of the men at the front did this: went on leave and returned to London, bought new clothes and visited relatives in parts of England. A bicycle moves the farmland around.

I took the packed tube to Kew Gardens. The tennis player Andy Murray was in the semi-finals at Wimbledon now—I discovered this when I took the Wimbledon train for a bit, surrounded by patrons of tennis with a day of professional sport ahead of them. Next to me, standing, was a couple. She was blond, about thirty-five, well dressed. He was mixed race, handsome, younger, with a good shirt cuff and watch. He was helping her. She may have been drunk. But she was in love with him. It looked like they were still dressed in clothes from the night before and hadn’t yet gone to bed. She wanted to have sex with him. She swung into his chest and pressed him against the plastic wall of the train. She wasn’t looking at him, or looking at his shoes. Her eyes were closed. Then she bent her head and he whispered into her blond hair. He was urging her to behave, or perhaps to misbehave. Her head under his chin, she had both hands now at his new belt, as if to unbuckle the belt. The train was crammed and I was next
to them but they had made a little island for themselves. It was as if they were the British Isles and we were the rest of the world, politely ignoring their antics. Except I had been away from love for too long and so took a vicarious interest. There were many young men in suits—striped blue shirts and dark shoes and trousers with a tapered front or a little curve. The trouser leg here was still shorter than in North America. Three of these men held printed sheets and were going over talking points, with one ear straining to hear what the man and woman were whispering to each other. We had all been recruited into their illicit behaviour.

At my stop I had to ask the woman to shift over so I could remove my bag from under her feet. The man casually lifted one of her feet with the side of his shoe.

Watching this couple, seeing their desire for each other’s company, made me incredibly lonely.

I walked towards signs that indicated the National Archives and found myself in the company of nine women and two men. We were forming a little platoon, all marching to arrive at the archives at the stroke of nine. I signed up for my reader’s card and did a fifteen-minute tutorial online. The original Newfoundland regimental diaries were here and I ordered them. Meanwhile I found a series of wounded/captured testimonials. Photocopies were twenty pence each. I read bureaucratic statistics of the numbers of men who had enlisted from Newfoundland
and how that compared to the rest of Britain’s former colonies. The purpose of these notes was to counter the notion that Newfoundland was not
“rowing its weight in the boat” in terms of numbers of men signing up. Close to two thousand Newfoundlanders served in the Naval Reserve and there were a hundred and eighty fatalities. Many of these men’s names were listed on the memorial at Beaumont-Hamel “for they had no grave but the sea.”

Rowing its weight. I remembered how oarlocks back then were thole pins—a pair of pegs in the gunwale that kept the oar steady. Thole means young fir. But to the Scots it’s a word that means to endure, and both definitions apply to the young Newfoundlanders.

I pored over numbers and names and statistics and troop sizes and divisions.
When war broke out the Newfoundland male population was 123,239. Category A—men who were fit to serve—totalled 30,816. The number serving was 4500.

These general overviews formed a blizzard of paper that travelled over the ocean and across the land to generals and colonels, and then back to the colonies in the mouths of returning soldiers who toured the outports to drum up enlistment. These files full of papers also formed a collective experience that allows historians now to say things such as “they were the generation that supplied men for the wars” and “those who survived returned home to work in the factories.”

But sometimes a fact will pop out of this neutral display of numbers, this tide of human affairs, and it’s like in books on chess when a grandmaster has made a surprise move, and the dry notation, which looks like columns of letters and numbers, is accompanied by an exclamation mark. The exuberance transfers from the page to the researcher. The exclamation mark occurs in your mind. And in this vast acreage of a room, hundreds of people were working with the past, their heads lit with wonder. I was struck by the fact that we were all working at the same flat elevation. Historians might say of us: We were the generation that supplied labour for the dissemination of historical records.

A woman with a very good camera took stills of her computer screen, I guess to save her the expense of the twenty pence. She was attractive, partly because she was working. I’ve always found industry and concentration alluring. I thought of Elsie Holloway back in Newfoundland, taking pictures of the regiment and even of her own brother. And how she must have reacted to receiving the telegram one day that her brother was killed.

While I waited for the regimental diaries, I found in a census for 1911 my own grandfather, the one who served in the Second World War. He was aged two in the census. Walter Hardy. He was a toddler being held in someone’s arms as he was counted and the street address noted, the town and county. A person had come to my great-grandparents’
door with a sheet of census paper, and written down the boy’s full name and his age, this boy who would grow up through the Great War and marry and have a daughter who was evacuated during the Second World War and marry and have me, who grew up through the Cold War. And this old man, my grandfather, who was two on this piece of paper, would mail me comic books full of the wars that he had grown up on and fought in. Exclamation mark.

The regimental diaries, I could tell from the photocopies I was making, were wrapped in fragile paper with a handwritten title on the cover. Inside, the pages had a printed header:

and on every page
INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY
is crossed out. These pages were part of a punch-hole binding, filled with the careful print of the commanding officer.

I spent the day at the archives and photocopied enough material to cover the entire floor white. But the original diaries I never got to handle. Someone had taken them out before me. Somewhere, across these several well-lit acres of industrial study of the past, a set of eyes was reading about the Newfoundland Regiment. It was the only fact I could
not research. Who. Reading was the only activity in the room not ordered or catalogued.

I took the tube back to my hostel and asked a stranger where I might buy toys. She pointed down the street. To Hamleys. Three storeys of toys. This is the oldest toy store in the world. Hamleys was here during the First World War, and had a hard time of it as foreign toys were not allowed and Germany was the largest producer of toys. So they sold domestically made dolls wearing khaki clothes and tanks and wind-up submarines. I remember my mother telling me that, during the second world war, she had a doll made of pottery and one side of the doll’s head was smashed. She used to cover that part of the head with a blanket.

I bought a bag of army men, a volcano that uses baking soda, a flashlight with twenty-four NASA pictures, a dart board with magnetic darts, a mini tabletop football set, and a pair of walkie-talkies with two nine-volt batteries. The toys of violence and geologic change and competition and distant territory.

I walked through Trafalgar Square then and petted the enormous lions at the base of Nelson’s column. The lions were sculpted by Edwin Landseer. Their tongues were hanging out because he had never seen a lion, so he copied the posture of his dog. This was his first sculpture.

The last commander of the Newfoundland Regiment, Adolph Bernard, was married in this Square. Bernard was
not a Newfoundlander, but the first officer from the regiment to command. By then the war was over. Bernard’s medical condition was poor: bad teeth, loose bowels, no energy. And on the first of June 1921 he married Maud Harris of St John’s. He was supposed to marry her in St John’s, but he could not get away from his post here in England. So there was a reception in St John’s and an eight-year-old Gordon Winter, future lieutenant governor of Newfoundland,
“looked very smart as a page.” Then Maud Harris sailed to England and was married at the Church of Saint Martin in the Fields, just over there. Adolph Bernard was in his forties. He lived another sixteen years. They had a daughter.

I walked west to eat in South Kensington. I was starved and tired and carrying a bag of toys. My bottom lip felt sore from windburn and sun. I heard, up the street, someone yell. From a large Hummer limousine, a young woman was stretched out the window. She blew a kiss to a man standing and riding hard on the pedals of a rickshaw. A number of people were impressed with this and clapped. It was dusk.

I ate at a packed oriental canteen—the whole square in behind South Kensington was very nice, and it was much better to eat here than near the Ritz, which was polished and buffed like the wood in Queen Mary’s car. There was an open courtyard, with tables on the paving stones. It was modern, but it harkened back.

Two men with rented Barclays bicycles tried to cross a busy divided road. They nudged the front wheels of their bicycles into the street while traffic swerved around them. They were looking for hesitation. Finally, they forced a black cab to brake and they sauntered over to the divider to join the traffic heading that way.

I finished my dinner and took a little walk into Hyde Park. I thought of Tommy Ricketts being feted in London after his investiture. The news of his being the youngest man ever to win the Victoria Cross was printed in the
Daily Mail
and the
Daily Mirror,
and he became a much sought-after man in London. He attended Drury Lane Theatre as one of Sir Edgar Bowring’s party for the Prisoners of War and Men in Hospital fund. His name was brought into the pantomime as a gag—a penalty of fame. Drury Lane, built a century before, housed three thousand people. Bowring’s party saw a production of “Babes in the Wood,” which was taking over from the waning “Shanghai.” It starred Stanley Lupino, Lily Long and Will Evans. There were goblins and cross-dressing and fairies and slapstick comedy. There were moments when the audience was expected to join in the chorus. What did Tommy Ricketts think of all this?