Into the Blizzard (6 page)

The shop with the Barbour clothing opened at nine in the morning. Next door was a window display of little army figures and cowboys & Indians, just like the small figures I had as a child. We had driven across Canada, a family of five, from Newfoundland to British Columbia, towing a pop-up camper trailer, looking for a better place to live. We drew treasure maps and crumpled the papers and held them out the open window when it rained. In Victoria, British Columbia, our last stop before turning around, my parents had bought us figurines of cowboys, and of Indians with their plastic birchbark canoes and little spears you could remove from their clasped hands. It felt
powerful installing and removing the weapons from their perpetual warring grip. And now, in front of this shop window, I wondered if I should get some for my son. But I had a long way to go, and surely, I thought, I’ll see some like these again.

I remembered there was a pub I’d liked around this area, but where was it now? I was hungry. As I walked, I admired the residential doorways with bull’s-eye glass for light. It was early glass, which meant these doors had been here a hundred years ago, experiencing the vibration of war. It was as if the street was providing me with the shops on my mind. Or perhaps, because the shops were closed and I could not find the pub that I wanted to eat in, they were somehow stymying my desire. The sun was now behind the trees.

I mention these things because it was a modern world I was walking through. This was what England had become one hundred years after the First World War. The American writer Nicholson Baker said that if there’s only one thing a reader takes away from his work, he hopes it’s that a person can think a lot of things. I agree: regular people think everything. And a hundred years ago they thought everything. I am naive, you’ll say, and misunderstand the experience of war, or the necessity of it. I am not wise to how a society is coerced into war. Baker’s approach? What I like about
Human Smoke,
his book on the Second World War, is the absence of narrative bias, a voice. And yet the selection of material
becomes Baker’s voice. The scenes he chooses to illuminate offer an opinion on the war. He ends the book with the one sentence he alone wrote: “By the end of 1942, the majority of the people who were killed in the war were still alive.”

Inside one of the closed stores—it was “to let”—I spotted a poster of a sculpted sheep. The sheep used to hang from the second storey. The sheep had been there during the war, so I stood back and imagined it still hanging above me. I overlaid the image of the sheep upon the stone face of the shop. The head of the sheep had fallen and smashed on the ground right there at my feet. So they had built a new one. The sheep was from a company in the early 1900s that sold, on consignment, woollen goods from women in the area. I was reminded of the gas station near our summer house in Newfoundland that sold woollen trigger mitts. The cashier placed the money in an envelope under the cash drawer for the woman down the road who knitted the mitts. I imagined the money and the envelope, making its trip down the road to the woman, and a rifle, held by warm hands, in the woods trained upon an animal. It made me happy, being at the junction of this entire enterprise.

Two Americans were skipping rope outside the youth hostel. They followed this by doing pushups against two rings in the pavement. America had not entered the war until 1917, and their comic books reflected this. I watched the collapse and press as the two Americans pushed the
earth away, then came so close to it again with their strong noses that they breathed upon the world. It was true that many, and especially the Americans themselves, felt they breathed the joy of life into both wars. The American writer James Salter says it’s
essential for a writer to travel. “It’s not a question of meeting or seeing new faces particularly, or hearing new stories, but of looking at life in a different way. It’s the curtain coming up on another act.”

So says the ex-military man Salter, who flew fighter jets in Korea.

The hostel had a kitchen and I ordered the fish dinner, but I was late and twenty German tourists had just eaten all the fish. A part of me hated the Germans for this act and wished they had been forever banned from the soil of Britain. I ate potato-leek soup and sat with the Germans and ordered a pint, and twenty minutes on the internet for one pound. The waitress poured the flat Guinness from a tin into a pint glass and then placed the glass on a ledge and punched a button. Slowly a head formed—the result of a magnet of some kind on the ledge.

I used the code on the slip of paper my pound had bought me to access the internet on the public computer. A Toronto friend was in Paris.
You’re probably in a war zone,
he wrote. I wasn’t yet, and I explained that I could only visit him in Paris if the Germans had been there in 1915.
You are venturing,
he replied,
into the heart of war.
That’s my friend’s
flat, laconic tone: sincere with praise, yet mixed with a spoonful of derision. The Newfoundland men, too, while training here in Salisbury, had been full of humour and light-heartedness alongside grievance at the hard training and resentment that their familiarity was being beaten out of them in order to instill the discipline required to turn men into military tools for tactical manoeuvres.

I received a flat stack of white sheets and a blue pillowcase. I was in Dorm 3, the attendant told me; there’s a key. A man from Lancashire asked where I was from and what I was doing. He liked that I wasn’t German. I explained my project and how I had chosen this dormitory so as to experience, a little, what it was like for the Newfoundlanders to sleep together in large tents in Salisbury. But there were Germans in the room. So I imagined myself in a hospital ward that treated both friend and foe alike. I reminded myself that Frances Cluett, the nurse, had ended up treating Germans.

I like islands. Islands that are poor like Cuba and Newfoundland. Because I’m not rich. The islands that attract the rich I’m less interested in—the island of Britain, for instance, where I’m standing now, which is twice the size
of the island of Newfoundland. Some islands lose their island quality—Manhattan, even though Manhattan is only a thousandth the size of Newfoundland. And yet most islands keep the essential parts that made them: a shoreline and density. What is called a littoral zone.

My father told me, when I was a child, of an island in Newfoundland called Glover Island. Glover Island is the same size as Manhattan. He’d pointed to it down the lake where our log cabin is. He had been to Glover Island once; it had rescued him, when an open boat he was in capsized. He had been moose hunting and the lake is a hundred miles long. The lake lies along the axis of the prevailing wind, as though the wind had made the lake. But the island and lake are built within a fault line that runs along the Appalachian mountains of Newfoundland. The fault disappears under the Atlantic Ocean and emerges again dividing the Hebrides in Scotland. There’s a pond on Glover Island, my father said to me, and on that pond there’s an island. Someday I’d like to spend a night on that island on a pond on an island in a lake on an island in the ocean.

I remembered lifting up over Toronto in the dark and noticing the other side of Lake Ontario. The lake does not look that big. In fact, I had wondered if what I was seeing were the islands that are very near the Toronto shoreline. I could understand the coastline down to Hamilton and then around to the American side of the lake. As the plane
ascended, it was difficult to gauge how small things were becoming. This was similar to my experience of Stonehenge. How big is it? The roped-off area did not allow you to get close enough to tell.

I slept well in the bottom bunk, with my sleeping mask and earplugs. I sank deep into the mythical embroidery of an old war. The window was open about four inches. Three pairs of bunks, six men. Some Germans. Civil. And the bunk was long enough for me.

Very early the next morning, the Americans immediately jumped to the floor and began their pushups. Breakfast cost five pounds for buffet egg, sausage, bacon, beans, mushrooms, tomato, toast, cereal, and coffee. I made a toasted cheese and ham sandwich to take with me on the train. On the way to the station I bought a flat cap at the Barbour shop—made by Deerhunter in Denmark. It was a dark olive, and the only one that fitted me well. I tried on some of the larger Bond caps that men wore a hundred years ago but I looked too ridiculous—as if I was trying intentionally to enter the past. There were no English caps of the right colour or weight.

The Newfoundlanders, if they had money, bought new outfits that looked like officers’ uniforms with big flat pockets. They did this in London, on their way north to train in Scotland.

I took the train out of Salisbury and awaited a change at Southampton. This was the port where the
Titanic
had left England. It was where many soldiers had left to join the wars in Turkey and France. And where many troops returned to English hospitals, wounded.

But I was heading north. The flat lands and rises I saw through the train window were interrupted by little clusters of trees on hills—the disturbance the result of farmers cultivating the land and leaving the trees. So it was the smooth flatness that was deliberately created, and a disturbance made out of omission.

The Lancashire man back at the hostel had told me he had to work on Monday. I’ll take a train with my bike to London and then back to Lancashire, he’d said. One of the Americans who had been doing pushups explained to the Germans that at his school a German student always won the scholarship in history, even speaking English as a second language. Imagine, he said, an American studying in Germany and pulling that off.

The Germans, someone else said, had lost the semi-final in the Euro Cup last night, 2–1 to Italy.

I opened my eyes and saw a sign with the word “alight”:
Alight here for Mottisfont Abbey.

The ticket collector woke me while he inspected a fallen
perforated gate over a fluorescent light tube near my seat. That’s a fitter’s job, actually, he said aloud but to himself.

Fitter’s job. Such English words!

Each car on the train had two surveillance globes on the ceiling, one at each end. The signs that indicated the presence of recording devices had an outdated image of a camera; symbols have not kept up with the objects they represent.

I dozed while tall earthen banks with clusters of thick bushes zipped by the train window. Even on flats, trees blocked the view. Which meant people in their homes didn’t have to see this train—but no one thinks of the needs of a train passenger. I required intimate views into kitchens and bedrooms for a fleeting second, so I could stitch these fractions of action together and form a country.

A trolley of coffee; this perked me up. The platforms at the stations where we stopped were sheltered by peaked corrugated roofs and it was difficult to see your connection because there were so many trains. Passengers who annoyed me: whistling and humming to music in their earphones, a man with a fluorescent orange bag who planted it in the aisle, people with cell phones that rang loudly with old-fashioned rings or mash-up reggae.

The public toilets cost thirty pence. You had to feed the coins into a turnstile. London Victoria was a lovely station, with the light coming through the arced ceiling. During the war, this had been the terminus for many trains arriving
from France with the wounded. It was wonderful now to leave the train for awhile and walk along streets that had such permanence in their markings.
You couldn’t create this in a climate where snowploughs scoured the surface of roads. And I wondered, Did it make people here any closer to their history than we were in Canada?

See you later.

Yeah, take it easy.

This was the exchange between two young men on the train, their hair shorn like sheep. This was how men communicated at Ramsey East station. Departing, ready for service.

It was a long day’s travel climbing up the entire body of England and, finally, into Scotland. The Newfoundlanders had loved this landscape. The beauty of the little packages of farming and the thatched roofs, the mild weather. It all seemed so tame and without constant toil and hardscrabble effort. My train had passed, in the distance, my own birthplace of Newcastle. I have visited there, and considered the other life I could have lived if my parents hadn’t moved to Newfoundland. My parents had some great-uncles who were in the First World War. They came back not quite
right in the head, my father said, and they didn’t talk about it. My father, as a boy, chopped splits for kindling and sold the bundles, on a cart, to the neighbours. He had trouble tying the bundles. An older man next door showed him how to do it. You take out a few sticks then tie up the rest and then shove the sticks back in. The man had been in the war. It was as if he was applying his own experience of what ties a bundle of men together. There is footage of the Tyneside Irish descending across no man’s land on the first of July. Their movements are the same as the ones ascribed to the Newfoundlanders: marching with purpose over an open area. The soldiers of the Newfoundland Regiment thought, like those soldiers from Newcastle, that they were going to war in France. The Newfoundlanders had landed in Devonport, trained at Salisbury, found the conditions inhumane—there was twice the average rainfall that year—and finally were sent to Fort George near Inverness. The weather was better at least, and they were away from the Canadians.

Their train took them north past Birmingham to Ardersier, which is near Inverness. An old fishing village. They moved into barracks at Fort George and had, for the first time, real beds to sleep in.
They had milk in their tea and butter on their bread, one Blue Puttee wrote. The commanding officer’s horse stopped in front of a tea house every morning to receive his lump of sugar. Once, they went to a dance in Inverness, and near curfew, Frank Lind and a
few other Blue Puttees jumped aboard a biplane and flew back to barracks in five minutes.
It is very exciting whizzing through the air at such an awful speed.