The Somme Stations (5 page)

Harry and Sylvia came rushing up to us, and the wife – her strange mood continuing – said straightaway, ‘Your father’s signed up for the army.’

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘He means to do it tomorrow,’ said the wife.

I looked at Lillian Backhouse, and she didn’t know what to say. Her husband, Peter, was over forty and worn out from
digging graves, so I didn’t think he’d be going off. Young Sylvia was looking at me curiously.

‘Do you
want
to get killed?’

‘I will definitely not get killed,’ I said.

Harry sat down on the edge of the road, and opened his book. I walked up, pulled off his cap, and ruffled his hair, to which he made no reply. I looked down at his page: two cowboys, both firing pistols at Indians on horses. One was instructing the other, ‘Only shoot to “wing”.’

Sylvia walked up, and said to Harry, ‘You should use a blade of grass.’

‘What for?’ he said, for he would speak to
her
.

‘To mark the place.’

‘I haven’t left off reading yet.’

‘No, but you will do.’

Harry turned the page, and I saw the same number of cowboys, but many more Indians.

‘You’re not going to sit there the whole of your life reading, are you?’ said Sylvia.

Harry made no reply.

‘I think he might very well do,’ Sylvia said to me, then: ‘Dad, will you be going to France?’

‘He must be trained first, idiot,’ said Harry, finally looking up from his book.

‘He’s right,’ I said to Sylvia. ‘Well, he’s not right to call you an idiot, and if he does it again, he’ll get a thick ear. But I’m to go first to Hull.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Sylvia, who suddenly looked near to tears. She was only six, and to my knowledge, she had never been to Hull, nor had any knowledge of it. But it was just the sound of the word that was so disheartening.

Lights-out at had been at ten-fifteen, half an hour since. I looked directly upwards, at the concrete ceiling, feeling like my own son, as I lay worrying, with my three blankets pulled right up about my neck and the book that my own son had sent me,
The Count of Monte Cristo
, under the blankets beside me. On top of my blankets I’d spread out a copy of the
Yorkshire Evening Press
for a bit of extra warmth. The largest of the headings read, ‘Allies Continue to Make Steady Progress’. Apparently we’d been making steady progress ever since the show began. By rights we ought to have been in Berlin by now. Only we weren’t.

On the floor above, bags of grain were still kept, and the Number One Warehouse at ‘C’ Wharf of Alexandra Dock, smelt barn-like as a result. On the floor below were drill hall, mess room, reading room, quartermaster’s stores and so on. At the end of my cot, and shuddering at intervals in the sea wind, were mighty double doors, barricaded up to a height of four feet by sandbags. If you pulled away the sandbags, opened those doors and stepped through, you’d drop down onto the dockside and be instantly killed. They were meant for connecting, via gangways, with the decks of ships. But there was only one ship in dock at present, and that was the North Eastern company’s own steamer, the SS
Rievaulx Abbey
, and it housed the officers of the battalion: the 17th Northumberland Fusiliers; or the Railway Pals.

We’d spent most of the day drilling in squads on the quays and doing Swedish exercises, which was what the army called physical jerks. I ought to have been worn out …

There were fifty cots in my row, which housed ‘E’ Company. I was in E Platoon of ‘E’ Company, so that was easy to remember. We were mainly York blokes in E Platoon. To my right lay Alfred Tinsley, the engine cleaner I’d seen eyeing the Lanky engine on the day the news about the battalion had been circulated. He’d turned eighteen on our arrival at Hull – so he’d lied about his age on enlisting. He’d latched on to me, having recognised me after that brief exchange of ours, and having heard I’d started my railway life on the footplate before giving it up for some mysterious reason.

He was reading, as best he could in the faint light from the few hurricane lamps that burned low between the cots – the
Railway Magazine.
He was a subscriber, as I was myself, but I knew that Tinsley kept his very carefully, so he could send them home for binding in red cloth with gold lettering. As I looked on, he closed the pages and slid the magazine under his bed, at which a voice called out, rather nastily: ‘No time for the railway hobby now, Tinsley.’ Well, we might have been called ‘The Railway Pals’, but that didn’t mean we
were
.

I turned the other way and there, separated from me by three snoring porters, was Oliver Butler, head propped on hand, staring my way. He didn’t flinch as I faced him, either, but just carried on staring as if it was his perfect right.

Was it all on account of that business in the Bootham Hotel, when he’d reminded the Chief that he was beyond his jurisdiction? It was Dawson, the cockney porter, who’d been rated by the Chief, not Butler himself, so why was he looking daggers at me? In fact, I had a pretty good idea. We were rivals: we were of about an age; both married men; both kept a clean collar at work; both hoping to be promoted, but keeping quiet about the fact. I was a detective sergeant in civilian life, so I was part
of the boss class, and could expect to be promoted before him. Secondly, I had previously been a footplate man, and all train guards have a down on footplate men, since they ride at the business end of the trains.

I turned and lay flat, looking up again, listening to the hundreds of snorers, like a band playing out of time. Dawson himself did not seem to be on the battalion strength; at any rate, I had not yet set eyes on him. He must have dodged the Chief somehow.

‘
Fusilier
,’ whispered Butler. We were called fusiliers, not privates, and he was addressing me.

I faced him again. His white face had the glow of candlewax; his hair had an oily black shine about it. He looked like a man who considered himself handsome.

‘You’re to go in to see the CO tomorrow,’ he said, and something that turned out to be a smile crept over his face.

‘How do you know?’

It was the first I’d heard of it.

‘It’s on the dining hall notice-board – went up just after supper.’

He was ever watchful of that notice-board, keeping an eye out for all promotions.

‘Why?’ I said.

‘Well, they wouldn’t keep a good chap like you in the ranks.’

From behind him, a very Yorkshire voice, shaky with held-back laughter, said:

‘I’m off now … off to sleep.’

Another, similar voice replied, ‘Are you ’n’ all?’

After an interval, the first one said, ‘I’m going now … I’m on my way.’

A further pause, then the second one said, ‘Have you gone yet?’ and I could hear the first bloke laughing under his blankets, so that the word ‘Aye’ came out with a splutter of laughter.

Oliver Butler held my gaze throughout. The speakers were his two cracked brothers: the identical twins, Andy and Roy, who called each other ‘Andy-lad’ and ‘Roy-boy’ and hardly ever spoke to anyone else. They belonged to the ruffian’s profession of platelayers or track walkers, which meant they’d spent most of their working days out in the fields. In the Butler family, all the effort seemed to have gone into creating the one wonderful creature: Oliver, the gold-braided train guard. The brothers were made of leftovers. They looked like drawings in the funny papers of very tired men: hollow faces, jaws hanging loose, eyes bulging – and their heads were too small. They were tough blokes though, no question.

For the next little while, I shifted about on my thin straw mattress, but no position answered. Oliver Butler had left off staring at me. Why was I being called in? It
must
be promotion. Every day, you’d see blokes sitting around sewing their new stripes onto their tunics, and trying not to look too chuffed. I would write to the wife as soon as I knew.

At midnight, I heard the distant clocks of central Hull chiming. Shortly after, I heard one bloke a few rows over say to another, very distinctly, ‘Will you stop
breathing
like that, mate?’ He must have had one of the snorers for a neighbour. The sound of the waves became quite distinct at three or so; at half after four, I heard a hydraulic motor start up in one of the other docks – and, not long after, footsteps on the dormitory floor. It was too much to hope that this was a bloke getting up for a piss, for they were
boot
steps and not stockinged feet. It was the regimental bugler, and I braced myself for the bloody racket.

The first thing I did was check the notice-board in the dining hall. I was due ‘on the ship’ for my interview with Colonel Aubrey Butterfield, commanding officer of the battalion, directly after dismiss on the square (which was one of the quays
of the dock). I would be marched over there by our section commander, Corporal Prendergast, who was in fact Oamer, the easy-going, pipe-smoking number two of the York booking office.

I went to the washrooms for a sluice-down.

All the taps were taken up, mostly with men shaving as best they could under the cold running water. The drill was that you stood behind a man shaving and waited your turn, but the man ahead of me was more boy than man, and so was not shaving but only washing. It was William, the York station runner – surname Harvey, as I had now discovered – and he made Alfred Tinsley, the eighteen-year-old would-be engine driver, look like a veteran. Both were slightly built, and more boys than men, and both had lied about their age when enlisting, but Harvey had lied more, since he’d barely turned seventeen when he walked into the recruitment office. William Harvey looked the part of the young hero as well, with his blue eyes and blond curls, whereas Tinsley was a gawky individual with a face and body he’d not yet grown into. Just then William was talking to his neighbour, who I didn’t know.

‘The Germans are frightened to death – ’ he said, before flattening his curls under the icy water, ‘ – at the sight of a bloody bullet,’ he added, coming up with a gasp. He left off washing, turned to me with a grin, and stepped aside.

‘Lovely day for it, eh … Mr Stringer?’ he said, towelling his hair.

‘For what, son?’ I said, setting about my chin with a none-too-sharp razor. ‘And call me Jim.’

‘The big march,’ he said.

‘I’d forgotten about that.’

The battalion, we had been informed, had secured the use of a very spacious field about four miles off, and we would be marching there for sporting activities. Young William was all in favour of it, red hot with excitement at the thought, he was.

The kid had moved off, and I saw that someone else had come into the position behind me, waiting for the tap … and it was that creeping Jesus Oliver Butler himself. When I’d finished shaving, I turned to him, and said, ‘It’s all yours, mate,’ at which Butler shook his head, saying, ‘I’ve already shaved.’ ‘Then get the fuck out of it,’ I wanted to say, but Butler said, ‘I think we’d better have a word about my brothers … I could see you getting mad at them last night. I bet you’d have liked to come over and lay ’em out.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ I said.

‘Or maybe you didn’t fancy your chances? See, Jim, you might think they’re a pair of simpletons, but what do you think the real business is going to be for us when we get over there in bloody France? Do you think we’re going in with the infantry, Jim? Perhaps you think we’re going to be building railways?’

‘Could you just get to the point?’

‘Right, Jim. Well, the empire is at the crisis of her fate, and she needs some blokes to shovel shit. Have you been down to the QM stores and had a look? There’s eleven hundred shovels there, Jim.’

‘We’re to get rifles as well, you know.’

‘Your most important bit of kit is going to be your shovel and the question is: can you use it? Can you dig an earth rampart, Jim? Can you dig a fucking
trench
? You’ve no taste for danger, I can see that – nor have I, we’re both intelligent men – and you’ll want to get behind cover in double-quick time. That’s where Andy and Roy come in. You might not see the point of them now, Jim, but put those boys in a field with a shovel in their hands when the machine guns are opening up … Different matter, Jim,
very different matter
.’ He stuck out his hand, saying, ‘Now look, I’ve said my piece … Shall we be mates?’

I shook his hand – well, it seemed the quickest way of getting shot of him – and he moved off to his breakfast.

I went through to the hall myself a few minutes later. The place was vast, lines stretching to infinity of men sitting on plain forms at long deal tables. At every place was a white plate with a hunk of bread and bacon on it. Trolleys on which sat giant tea urns were wheeled by squads of orderlies, and I did not like to see their thin white suits, because they put me in mind of hospitals. We ordinary soldiers wore civilian clothes: dark trousers and tunic shirts with braces hanging down. We didn’t have uniforms yet, only boots and caps – and there were only two sizes of caps: large and small, whereas most of the blokes, of course, were medium-sized. The officers did have uniforms, and there were plenty of that lot strolling about, for they’d breakfasted earlier, on their boat. I saw our platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Quinn, late of the North Eastern Railway Engineers’ Drawing Office at York. ‘Unfortunately …’ he was saying to a fellow officer. He was a good-looking chap, was Quinn, with a square face, sad brown eyes and a mournful way of talking. He’d been to St Peter’s School, York: the Eton of the bloody North.