The Summer Isles (33 page)

“It must have been terrible.”

“It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t terrible at all. I’ve never laughed more in my life, or felt more wanted, more as if I belonged. The rain. The rats. The mud. It was all like some stupid practical joke. And it was quiet a lot of the time and there were empty fields where the corn had grown wild and you could lie down in the evening and stare up at a perfect sky. Then down to the town, most us of half-drunk already, and the fat white mademoiselles spitting on their fingers and saying
laver vous.
Yes, Griff, I did that too. And I had friends, mates, encounters. There were places—the back of the cookhouses, other odd corners. Nobody cared. Everything was accepted as long as you kept it out of the noses of the officers and did your job. But for me love—sex—whatever you call it, just faded. Perhaps it had never been there…” He stares down, his silvered head bowed as the rockets whoosh and wheel, scrawling out the sky.

“We were sent to the Somme in June 1916. It was supposed to be the big push that would win the War, but we knew that we were just covering a cock-up that the French had made. I remember hearing the guns as we marched along this road behind the flour wagons. And for the first time, after over a year of fighting and hearing shells and being shot at, I felt afraid…

“It’s terrible, you know, Griff. Feeling afraid when you know that fear’s the only logical reaction. Nerves—they’re okay, every soldier gets nerves when something’s about to start. But fear, real fear—what we called funk—it freezes you up. It means you’re no longer working for the man next to you.

“I lay awake that last night. We knew we were going over the top in the morning. Not that they told you, but you could tell from the guns. I couldn’t sleep. Boom, boom, and the stink of the trenches. Boom, boom, boom. That great iron voice. The sergeant came around before dawn with diamonds of felt to sew into the sacking of our helmets so that the rest of the Regiment would know who we were. About twenty of us had to share one needle and thread, and my hands were so useless that I had to get someone else to do mine. I could barely breathe, but they all thought it was just Frannie’s nerves, which was alright, because they all felt nerves. They weren’t afraid. Not the way Frannie Eveleigh was. They didn’t know funk, fear. They were laughing, joking, humming some stupid tune under their breath when the captain came to tell us we were getting a chance to have a go at the Hun and how much it all mattered to the King and Lloyd George and the whole bloody country. I felt sorry for him, too. The snipers and machine gunners always went for the officers first.

“The big guns stopped, and that silence was the worst thing of all. I felt as though I was watching myself. Frozen. I didn’t know if I could go over the top, although I was sure I’d be court martialled and shot if I didn’t. But that wasn’t enough—the threat of some other kind of death a few weeks later.

“Then the guns started again. Boom, boom. The sound seemed to cover us like a blanket and then this vast final massive earth-shaking
boom
that was a land mine the sappers had planted under the German trenches. Then we were moved up to the front line. Thousands, thousands of us. And there was silence, just men breathing and the shuffle of our feet on the duckboards and the creak and jingle of our packs. And we stared at the last sandbags ahead of us and the ladders that had been laid against them. And we waited. It was too late for joking now. It was too late for anything. The officers checked their watches and someone blew a whistle about a mile off. Then another whistle blew closer and you could hear the sound coming towards you like a train.

“Men started to climb out of the trenches—I watched them go ahead of me. Some were yelling the way you were supposed to and some went quietly and some prayed. A lot of them just fell back and I thought they were being clumsy until I realised they’d been shot already. Guns were clattering and you could tell from the sound that they weren’t ours. The Germans were firing straight back at us as soon as we stuck our bloody heads over the top. And I just stood there. It was the worst moment of my life but I knew I couldn’t go back, so I started to climb up out of that trench. I went over into the morning with the sky suddenly big above me. My mates were already running around the pool of a big shell hole far ahead—I could just catch their voices on the wind. And Boom boom. Rat-a-tat-tat as they were cut down one by one. I was just wandering in a nightmare. I wasn’t running. I wasn’t even sure if my feet were moving…

“I don’t know when I got hit, Griff—or how long it took. It just felt as if something had pushed against me and there was this heat across my side as I slid down into this long hollow. The mud came up around my waist and I knew then that I was hit because I could see these trails of blood fanning out like roots through the algae. But I knew it wasn’t that bad. I could touch myself there and it barely hurt. I should have gone on, Griff. I should have climbed out of that ditch and gone on. But I didn’t. I just crouched there the whole day. I was shivering, weeping. Boom, boom—I could hear the shells whistling over. The bullets rattling. But I was alone with my fear, Griff. Quite alone.

“Darkness came and the flares went up and the guns still boomed and crackled, although you knew that the German snipers would aim high most of the time at night to give the rescue parties a chance. I tried to get up then, but the sides of the ditch were slippery and my left side seemed to have frozen. Then I heard voices close by and I shouted back. Men with stretchers found me and hauled me out. I was muddy and blood-sodden and I looked enough of a mess to be convincing as I was carried back to the field dressing station.

“Everything there smelled of shit and mud and iodine and dying men. The soldier on the stretcher beside me kept trying to talk, but even when I managed to turn myself over to see more of him, I couldn’t work out what he was saying. The words he was making seemed to begin with a K and then an M, but the sound was more like something caught in his throat. His uniform was dry—there was hardly any blood on it. He didn’t even seem to be wounded. Then I moved myself up some more until I could see his other side, and that the right side of his skull had been smashed away like the top of an egg. His right eyeball was just lying there it in its socket like some anatomical drawing, his jaw was shattered and his tongue was embedded with bits of his teeth. It didn’t make any sense for him to be alive at all. I suppose that was why they’d just left him here—because they expected him to die.

“The two eyes, the good one and the bad, were staring up at me. I felt his hand flapping at mine, and I looked down and saw that he was trying to point towards a pistol he had strapped to his belt. I understood then what he’d been trying to say, which was Kill Me. Kill Me. It was the kind of favour you’d do for any mate at a time like that—and one that you’d hope someone else would have the guts to do for you. No one would have noticed a single pistol shot, not here in all this mess where the guns were still loud. But I knew that I couldn’t do it.

“I just lay back and stared up at the lantern as this soldier beside me gagged and moaned, knowing that this was funk, this was fear, that I was worthless as a soldier. I was feverish by the time I was tagged and looked at inside the treatment tent. I was given some water and a jab of morphine and quinine and carried across the fields to a big river barge just as dawn was coming. It was supposed to provide an easier journey for the casualties to the back-of-the-line hospital, but it was slow, and there were no windows down inside the hold. You could still smell the coal that they’d cleared out of the barge beneath all the other stench, and you could hear the water laughing around the sides as we pulled away from the jetty.

“A few men were crying and moaning. A lot were comatose or simply asleep. But we all knew that we were travelling somewhere—those of us who knew anything. Back to life, I suppose. Or death. The man with the half-blown off head was on the pallet nearest to me, and for a while he was quiet and I thought he’d given up the clicking and moaning and had perhaps died at last, but then his whole body gave a spasm and he started it all up again. It was terrible this time. He wasn’t even trying to speak. His limbs were jerking and this noise he was making just went on and on. It was a sound out of hell.

“It was too late, by now, to use his gun. But I managed to undo the straps of my pallet and stand up though my head was swimming. He seemed to quieten for a moment then, and look back up at me with his good eye. I took strength from that. In fact, it seemed as if was his strength that enabled me to take the blanket from by his feet and ball it up and push it down hard over his face and hold it there. Of course, he began to fight and buck after a while—it’s what happens when you’re dying, you can’t help it. And it takes longer than you’d imagine to kill a man even when he’s wounded. But eventually he stopped struggling. I was shivering and in tears as I finally lifted the blanket from him. And I was glad that I still had this one soldierly act left in me, even if I’d left it much too late. I knew that he’d died a hero’s death, this man. This soldier. This nameless friend…

“The boat was rocking and my fever was surging back into me again. Perhaps it was that or the drugs I’d been given which made me do what I did. I don’t know. I remember thinking that he had black hair like mine, that he had blue eyes, and what would have been a square jaw before the bullet wrecked it. A thinner kind of face. I felt for the waxed envelope that they’d tied to his tunic at the dressing station. His name was John Arthur, and he was a private—a rifleman like me—in the Staffordshires, although from a different battalion. It struck me that John Arthur was a good name for a soldier, a good name for a man. I’d always hated being Francis Eveleigh—it said everything about the pretensions of my parents and nothing at all about me. I suppose I thought I might be able to lose the fear and the funk if I had a name like that, although at the time as I undid my own envelope and tied it to him and felt for his pay book and swapped it with mine and somehow even lifted his identity tags over his head, I really didn’t know what I was thinking. It was all done for that moment, in the foul air of that barge with the water laughing beside me, just to see how it felt to become him. And straight away, you know, as I lay down again on my pallet and the fever began to take a bigger hold, I felt better…

“When I woke up in the room of a chateau that had been requisitioned as a hospital, the nurses who walked by and tucked at my sheets and cleaned me up called me John. And that seemed right. It was the most natural thing in the world to be John…”

John Arthur is silent for a moment as the sky above London foams with light and the fireworks display reaches its climax, glinting on the bricks, pushing at us like a wind, catching emerald and ruby pinpoints in his eyes and the wetness of his lower lip. The firecrackers are going
boom boom boom.

“It’s not that unusual,” I say, “for people to undergo some sort of change if they’ve been near to death.”

“But you have to see it from inside, Griff. I
was
different. I had
changed.
Francis Eveleigh really did die that day in the Somme.”

“Didn’t anyone ever suspect?”

“The rest of my platoon had been wiped out. So had John Arthur’s. And I caught pneumonia, you see, Griff, so I was shipped back to England and a sanatorium. By the time I was finally ready for active service six months later, I could have been anyone for all the difference it made. John Arthur never got any letters, and I found out from his file that he had no wife, no loved ones, no family. No one who cared about him apart from me.

“So I went back to the front as S4538 Rifleman Arthur, D Company 7th Service Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, and I knew from the first time I heard the guns that this time it would be better, this time I wouldn’t feel any fear. I was even made corporal, which was something Francis Eveleigh would never have become. I won the George Cross… But that’s common knowledge, isn’t it?”

“What was it like when the War ended?”

“It was the end of everything. People in the streets back in England looked away from you. They blamed us soldiers for losing the War. I don’t know. I suppose that in our hearts we felt the same. I used to blame myself for defiling the name of this man, this John Arthur. He deserved more than I’d been able to give him. This empty country, this lost War.

“I went up to Raughton, which was John Arthur’s last address before enlisting. I found out that the Yorkshire accent I’d copied from one of the cooks was all wrong, but that didn’t matter. We were like ghosts. Nobody seemed to belong anywhere then. The place was just a pit village and the address was a cheap boarding house. I stayed there for a few weeks, finding out a bit more about this person—this John Arthur. One or two people told me they remembered him, but I never really knew if they did. He’d been older than me, but seemed to have made little impression on the world, almost as if he’d been waiting for the War to start. His father had been an itinerant who’d started out in the West Country and had died in a mining accident. One day I went across to the foundry in the next valley in search of work…

“The place was just like everywhere else, and virtually derelict now that the War orders had gone. But the woman in the office who looked down at my name said she remembered me. There was no work going, but she offered to put me up for a while, and I accepted. I didn’t have the money to pay for the boarding house much longer anyway.”

“That was Mrs. Framley?”

“Enid Framley. She used to put lodgers up in the spare bedroom, and John Arthur had stayed with her for a few weeks before he enlisted. From the first moment she saw me, she just accepted me as him. She said John and her son Billy had become friends. Of course, Billy had enlisted too, and was killed at Ypres. So I stayed at Enid Framley’s and she fed me up and helped me find the occasional bit of work, and around the fire in the evenings we’d talk about how it had once been, those golden times before the War with me and her son Billy. She liked me to call her Auntie. I really do think she believed the stories that we made up on those evenings together, me and Billy out cycling the hills, or fishing on summer evenings at the millpond.