Aunt Letitia Read online

  Pushing fear to the back of her mind, she made her way up the last few steps and looked around.

  Standing in the road, she looked up at her house. It was undamaged, as if nothing had happened, or so it seemed; but near the far end of the terrace there was a neat hole. Where a house had stood only minutes before, there was now just a pile of bricks and timber. The ruins were lit from behind by a great conflagration in the next street.

  She tilted her head, looking into the night sky, half expecting to see German planes swooping low, grinning airmen in goggles hoisting out bombs, but there was nothing, just a milky blackness and the criss-cross pattern of searchlights. She was almost disappointed. She had been ready to shake her fists at the bombers, show her defiance. She was finding her old self. The moment of weakness had passed.

  The shocking sight of the ruined house mesmerized her, drew her forward. A crowd had gathered at the scene. ARP wardens, fire-fighters, police were pulling bodies out of the rubble. Voices were raised, hands gesticulating. Onlookers watched, their eyes glassy in the light of the fire. Somewhere a woman was wailing, a thin but piercing sound. It was suddenly cut short as the last piece of wall toppled over, sending up clouds of dust. Flames and billowing smoke were getting nearer, driven by the wind.

  Letitia put out her hand, stopped a passing policeman. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  The policeman looked at her unseeingly. ‘No, madam, nothing. You go on back to the shelter. Take cover.’

  Letitia turned to go, but at that moment two men passed her carrying a body – or something that once had been a body. Now it was just a mangled parcel of torn flesh and shattered bones. Blood oozed from it, leaving a trail on the pavement.

  Letitia turned away. As she limped down the area steps, she began shaking again. It could easily have been her body those men were carrying away: a shapeless corpse. Hugh’s words written long before came back to her: The myriad protracted and agonizing ways in which a man can die…. She had only ever been able to guess at the sights he had seen in France and Flanders, but this time civilians were to experience it all too.

  In her wrecked kitchen, Letitia made a show of sweeping up the debris. She blocked up the windows as best she could with whatever came to hand: bits of shredded blackout, tea towels, cardboard. On the dresser, the whisky bottle had also miraculously survived. She took it as a sign. With her torch in one hand and the bottle in her other, she made her way slowly up to bed.

  The letter that Letitia had recalled, in which Hugh had talked of the many faces of death, had been written under a tree in Flanders in July 1917. Hugh had been in a camp behind the lines near Poperinghe. The flat dismal countryside lay sodden under a sombre grey sky. Rain poured down incessantly. Drips slid off leaves and branches, fell onto the paper and smudged his words. But the whole letter was in truth a smudge. He no longer tried to describe his day-to-day life at the front, the horror of it, the squalor. Indeed, horror had become too mundane to be remarked upon. Horror was the normal run of life. Normality, the pre-war life of order and plenty, had become a distant, fading dream.

  Some days later, as Letitia far away in peaceful Warwickshire had been reading the rain-stained letter, Hugh’s battalion moved up to the front line, relieving a party of Highlanders. Rain continued to fall. The trenches were knee-deep in water. Everywhere was mud. Life was lived in a quagmire. Horses drowned in shell holes, vehicles sank without trace, trench walls collapsed burying men alive. Only the rats prospered.

  Hugh sat in his dugout holding a tin cup of tea. A candle guttered on top of an upturned crate beside him. The canvas flap across the entrance wavered in the breeze. In a few hours, with the first hint of dawn, there was to be an attack. The objective was a wood: at least, it had been a wood once-upon-a-time. Now it was nothing more than a few shell-battered stumps sticking up out of the mud. Hugh had looked at it through a periscope. As the light faded, the ghastly scene had sunk thankfully into oblivion, but the image was graven in Hugh’s mind as he sat with his tea. He couldn’t help but wonder if that blasted, benighted spot was to be his last resting place.

  The brief hours of darkness soon came to an end. The guns thundered and roared, the bombardment now at its most intense; but in the trenches there was a hush, an air of anxious expectancy, of tight-lipped fear.

  Hugh poured the last dregs of his cold and bitter-tasting tea onto the dugout floor, and put the mug aside. He would not need that in the attack. Amongst the other things he was leaving behind was a letter addressed to Aunt Letitia, to be sent to her in the event of his death. He had written it in 1915. So far, it had never been sent; but his luck was bound to run out one day. After nearly three years, he felt he was living on borrowed time.

  There was a stir in the line, whisperings and furtive movement.

  The hour had come.

  Standing on the fire step, Hugh looked out into the darkness. Far off, all along the line, he could see the flashing of hundreds of German guns, retaliating against the British barrage. As usual, Jerry knew all about the attack. They were ready and waiting.

  Hugh’s heart beat double time. Today was his twenty-first birthday, he’d all but forgotten. Would he live to see it through?

  Only the faintest presage of dawn streaked the eastern sky. Whistles sounded. Hugh scrambled up the ladder. He always led his platoon from the front, felt it was his duty, but today he hardly cared whether they followed him or not. To his right, a fellow subaltern was taking the opposite tack, running up and down the trench with his revolver, driving his men over the parapet at gunpoint.

  The trench was left behind. Hugh’s feet skidded in the mud as he walked steadily forward across no-man’s land. The rain had stopped at long last but the very air seemed saturated. Mist hung in the hollows. And all the time the roar of the guns continued unabated. But now a new and evil sound started up. The German machine-guns had begun their greedy work. Bullets buzzed like swarms of angry hornets. Hugh knew it was only a matter of time before he was hit. Until then, he had to keep going. There was nothing else one could do.

  He was dimly aware that his men were with him, strung out on either side. So they had followed him after all. Only there seemed to be fewer of them than he remembered.

  So many lost, so soon?

  Without warning, a huge column of earth suddenly reared up right in front of him. The sound of an explosion shredded his eardrums. He staggered, dazed, half-blind, as mud and shrapnel rained down on him. A chasm seemed to open up under his feet. He fell into it; and as he fell, his grateful mind took flight, leaving the scene of carnage and ruin far behind.

  When he came to, it was eerily quiet. The barrage had moved to another part of the line, the whine of bullets had ceased. It was broad daylight. He was lying face down in mud. The churned up earth stretched away in all directions, brown and sodden. He was sodden too, his clothes sticking to his cold skin.

  He knew he must be out in no-man’s land; but where exactly? The urge to know was overpowering. It was utter madness, but he couldn’t stop himself from trying to stand. Bracing himself, he heaved his body upwards, but there was something wrong. One of his legs was not working. A red stain was spreading through the khaki material of his left trouser leg.

  A wound. A Blighty one? It seemed providential, coming on his birthday. So his luck had held once again, and now he’d get away from all this, get back to England. A month’s rest, perhaps two: it depended how bad the wound was. It didn’t feel too bad, just a scratch perhaps. But slowly his euphoria seeped away as he lay there with his cheek pressed against churned-up mud. He was wounded, alone, out in the middle of no-man’s land, and with no idea in which direction his own line lay. It was broad daylight; there would be no stretcher parties until the coming of darkness. His leg was leaking blood – it was pouring out: this was no scratch. He was cold to the marrow, felt weak. It was all hopeless. So much for Blighty.

  He lay still, listening to the distant guns, the occasional lazy rat-tat-tat of a single
machine-gun. Somewhere, a man was moaning in pain, the sound rising and falling, guttural and wordless, tailing off after a while into a whimper, then silence.

  Hugh stirred. Some deep-seated instinct would not let him rest, was demanding he make an attempt to save himself; so he crawled, pulling himself forward by his hands, dragging his useless leg behind him in the mud. The leg was numb. Why was he not in agony? It bothered him.

  After a while he had to stop. He had no energy left and he was getting nowhere. All around the mud stretched on and on. But when he was able to take stock, he found that he had come to a place where many men lay dead: mutilated bodies, detached limbs, gaping mouths, sightless eyes. It made him feel sick. He couldn’t stand it, so he turned over on his back, looked up at the grey sky. Such a big sky, vast and empty except for the clouds. He was nothing in comparison, a worm writhing in the mud.

  Eventually he felt strong enough to go on. He began crawling again, dragging himself across the pock-marked ground. He was soaked through; his arms ached; he was getting nowhere, but he couldn’t stop, he just went on and on, crawling hour after hour – or so it seemed.

  Suddenly a shell-hole opened in front of him and he pitched into it, sliding head first down towards a pool of foetid water. He didn’t like to think what nameless horrors lurked beneath its slimy surface and he tried desperately to scramble back up the side of the crater, came to rest at last panting with his fingers clinging to the rim.

  ‘Cor! Am I glad to see you, mate!’

  The unexpected cockney voice made him jump, as if he’d forgotten about speech, forgotten such a thing existed: forgotten that there was anyone else alive except him. He looked round, disoriented.

  On the far side of the crater, curled up near the rim, was a scrawny figure caked from head to foot in mud, as if he was made out of the earth on which he lay. He was hatless, his hair plastered on his skull. White eyes, sharp and alert, blinked out of the grimy face.

  ‘You ain’t got a fag, have you, mate? I’ve got a light, see, but no smokes left.’

  ‘Where are we?’ Hugh’s voice was a barely audible croak.

  ‘I ain’t got the foggiest, mate. But I’ll tell you something, I ain’t shifting from this ’ere hole till its dark, not for nobody I ain’t.’

  Hugh felt a vague sense of unease which he could not pin down. Shouldn’t a private address an officer with a bit more respect? But what did rank matter out here? They were not soldiers now. They were barely even men – or, at least, that was what it felt like.

  All the same, there had been a purpose to all this once.

  ‘The attack. What happened?’ He tried to inject the confidence of a lieutenant into his voice.

  The tommy shrugged. ‘Usual fuck-up, I expect. It was all getting a bit too hot for me, so I ducked down here for a bit until things quietened down; only things never did quieten down until it was too light to move. Fair enough, I says, I’ll just lie low till it’s dark and then toddle back to our lines, which must be somewhere over that way.’ He waved his hand in the air. Hugh was uncertain which direction was being indicated. ‘Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind doing me bit, but it seems to me as the whole thing is one big balls-up. Those bleeding brass hats, they couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery. Every bleeding time it’s the same. We climb out of the trench; we walk two or three yards, we get cut up. Well, not me. Not this time. I’ve had enough. I’m not about to get myself done in and all for nothing. So I’m going to sit nice and quiet in this ’ere hole until dark and then head back to the line. But I only had a couple of ciggies on me and I’ve been gasping. So how about that smoke, mate?’

  ‘I’m not sure if I’ve still got….’ Hugh reached into his pocket for his cigarette case. As he did so, he became aware of a dull throbbing pain which had not been there before. His leg had come to life.

  The tommy started sliding around the edge of the crater on his buttocks, eager to get his hands on a cigarette. As Hugh watched him, his sense of unease returned. He blinked – or, at least, he thought he’d blinked, but when he opened his eyes, the tommy was right next to him, as if time had skipped a beat. Everything was fuzzy too, as if dusk was coming on, but he could clearly see the whites of the tommy’s eyes, and the narrow black pupils.

  Hugh offered his cigarette case as if putting a barrier between them.

  The tommy helped himself to four cigarettes, holding them by the tips of his fingers. ‘Iron rations,’ he said with a grin. He handed the cigarette case back to Hugh and then brought out a cigarette case of his own. It was unexpectedly opulent, gold or gold-plated, looked incongruous in his grubby hands.

  ‘Like it?’ The tommy had seen Hugh staring. He passed the cigarette case across with a self-satisfied air. ‘I got it in Blighty one time. There was this tart in the Big Smoke, blond hair, long legs, big … you get the picture. She was a right one, no mistake. Said she was an actress. I said, “If you’re an actress then I’m Kaiser Bill”. Still, she put on a good show for me, if you know what I mean. And after, when she weren’t looking, I palmed me money back and took this as extras.’ He laughed, amused by his own story.

  Hugh turned the cigarette case over, squinting at it. It was engraved. To Dolly, With Much Gratitude, W.R.H.

  ‘Her name weren’t Dolly, neither, so I was only doing what she’d done already. She’d half-inched it from one of her tricks, that’s what I reckon.’ The tommy slipped a cigarette between his lips. ‘I like to collect souvenirs, to remind me. Places I’ve been. Girls I’ve had.’ He grinned, and fished out a lighter.

  Hugh had two cigarettes remaining. He took one out of his case, hoping it might somehow lessen the pain in his leg and help him keep awake. The tommy passed him the lighter in a matey way. It was another of his ‘souvenirs’, by the look of it, probably silver, and also engraved. Hugh peered at it through the fog that was slowly enveloping him, trying to make out the writing. Four capital letters.

  Initials.

  His own initials.

  His own initials!

  His hand shook as he turned the lighter over and over, the unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. It couldn’t possibly be the same lighter. It couldn’t possibly.

  But it was.

  He stared with blurred vision at the letters, H.A.A.B. It was the lighter his father had given him on the dockside at Southampton all those years ago. It was the lighter he had given to Megan O’Connor one April afternoon – an afternoon of golden sunshine and golden smiles which now seemed so remote that he could hardly believe it had ever happened.

  Megan. London. Those stolen days in 1912. He’d felt so guilty about it all afterwards, but he’d never regretted it, however wrong it had been.

  Hugh gripped the lighter so that it dug into his palm. Rage twisted through him, throbbing in time with the pain in his leg, as he began to piece things together and wonder how the tommy had come by this trophy. When she wasn’t looking, I palmed me money back and took this as extra….

  ‘Let’s have it back, then, mate.’ The tommy, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth, held out his hand. There was an edge to his words, his eyes watching Hugh narrowly.

  Hugh’s fist closed even tighter. ‘Where did you get this?’ His cigarette dropped from his mouth as he spoke, lay forgotten in the mud.

  ‘Ah, well, that’s got sentimental value, that has.’

  ‘I asked you where you got it. You stole it, didn’t you?’

  ‘I never did. I got it from me—’

  ‘You stole it. You’re a thief. Nothing but a common thief.’

  ‘Now listen ’ere, mate, I don’t have to take that from you, officer or no.’

  ‘You’re a thief and a shirker and I shall have you up on a charge. Now get away from me. Get back over there. Go.’

  ‘Hold on now. I ain’t going nowhere, chum. You’re an officer, fair enough. I knew that soon as you opened your mouth. But the way I look at it, out here we’re all the same. We’re all one step away from snuffing it. So I don
’t reckon it’s right for you to go ordering me about as if we was behind the lines. It ain’t right, see?’ The tommy smoked as he spoke, manipulating the cigarette with his lips. His voice ended on a menacing note.

  But Hugh was not listening, only one idea persisting against the fuzziness in his head and the pain in his leg: he wanted to be rid of the tommy, to get away from him. Only half aware of what he was doing, Hugh found himself yelling at the other man, screaming at him, words tumbling out in a meaningless jumble.

  The tommy backed away, eyeing Hugh in alarm.

  Suddenly, without preamble, a machine-gun opened up: measured, relentless, deadly. Bullets zinged overhead, thudded into the mud. And then a second gun joined the first in sinister counterpoint.

  The tommy spat out the stub of his cigarette, alarmed. ‘Shut your noise! Do you want Fritz to know we’re here?’

  Hugh was past caring. If his shouting brought down on them the biggest strafing of the war, so much the better. The tommy would receive his deserts, and Hugh would be saved from this lingering death, his life leaking away out of his leg.

  But the tommy had other ideas. He slithered forward, grabbed hold of Hugh. Big muddy hands met around Hugh’s neck as if trying to choke the noise off. He hissed fiercely into Hugh’s ear. ‘Are you gonna shut up with that row? Are you?’

  As before, when he’d been crawling over no-man’s land, instinct now took over. From some deep reserve, Hugh found the strength for one last effort. He grappled with the tommy, tried to wrench the man’s hands away. Even as he did so, a stabbing pain shot up his leg and seemed to burst out of him in a savage, guttural scream. They were both slippery with mud. The tommy, losing his footing, slipping from Hugh’s grasp, toppled backwards and rolled towards the foetid water. He regained his balance just in time, before the pool could claim him. Immediately he set off back up the side of the crater, crawling on his hands and knees, mud sucking at him, eyes blazing.