Gifts of War (22 page)

I have always liked numbers. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s their precision, the lack of doubt associated with them. Many
words
, certainly, are worryingly vague, ambiguous, or malleable—“justice,” for example, or “God;” above all, “love.” I mention this because it was my love of numbers that led me, in April of 1916, to spend time on the pages of German newspapers that few of the others in the Gym chose to linger over. I am talking about the financial pages and, in particular, the tables of stocks and shares. I concentrated on companies in the science and technology sector of the market.

Before the war, our family firm had published a book, a very technical book, by a German physicist, about tides, the nature of water flow, and the various tide races around the world. I knew, because it said so on the title page of the book, that he was a consultant to the
Bremerhaven engineering firm of STG, the See-Technik Gesellschaft, or Maritime Engineering Company. A few months after I had settled in at Northumberland Avenue, I happened to notice STG in the stock exchange listings of the
Berliner Zeitung
. Their shares had risen by two marks the previous day.

Now, this was a small thing in itself but it opened up a whole new world for me. I had assumed, I suppose—though in truth I hadn’t really given any thought to it at all—that most if not all firms did badly in wartime. But, of course, a moment’s reflection will tell you that such an idea is naïve. If you make uniforms, or weapons, or military ships, or medals, or coffins, or ammunition, or prayer books, or crosses for graves, your services are going to be in demand.

And that is what I noticed about STG: their share price was very healthy indeed. We didn’t hang on to outdated newspapers in the Gym; they were shipped to the basement, where they were held for a while, then destroyed. Down in the basement, I found earlier copies of the
Berliner Zeitung
, and of other German papers that also carried stock exchange listings. Using these various titles I was able to plot the share price of STG over the previous four months. And very interesting reading it made.

I wasn’t at my best that day—I thought I was coming down with a cold—but I showed the figures to Sheila and we discussed it with the team leader from the economics table. He agreed that my reasoning was sound, so Sheila and I went to see Pritchard.

“Yes?” he said, waving us to a seat, though Sheila, as before, preferred the radiator.

I took a sheaf of clippings from a folder I had created.

“Give me the headline,” he said. “We’re all busy, Hal, and we trust you.”

“Not this time, sir.” I sniffled as I said this. “You’ll want to see the raw material for yourself.”

He leaned forward and opened the file. “Stock prices? What
is
this?”

I gave him some background. “In 1912, our family firm published a book by a certain Ulrich Pöhl, a hydrologist, I suppose you’d call him. An expert on water, anyway—on tides, forces in water, underwater currents, hard science. He was a consultant to a Bremerhaven firm,” I said and I explained about STG. “For that reason, I’ve always taken an interest in the company, and when I came to the Gym I looked it up.” I pointed to the cuttings in the file. “I’ve been following it intermittently and if you go through those lists, you’ll see that, over the past four months, the engineering sector has risen by, roughly speaking, two percent. STG, on the other hand, is up twenty-three percent. Something’s going on there, and people in the know are buying shares.”

Pritchard put on his spectacles and started going through the figures. He sniffed once or twice and licked his finger, to flick through the cuttings, but otherwise said nothing. Eventually he was done.

“You’re right about the share price. What’s your analysis?”

I glanced at Sheila. She smiled encouragingly.

“STG is a Bremerhaven-based shipbuilding company with a hydrologist as a consultant. I’d say that points to submarines. Either STG have invented something new—a faster, deeper, deadlier sub— or they’ve got a big order to expand production.”

Pritchard was scribbling notes. “You’ve run this by the economics people?”

“Yes sir.” Sheila was lighting a cigarette.

“There’s no way of telling, I suppose, which of those scenarios is the right one?”

“Not really,” I said. “But Pöhl’s book came out in 1912. You could have our hydrologists check out what research he was doing in the years before the war—it might give us a clue. Also, you might have
people check out the acknowledgments page in the book—he mentions by name other specialists he showed the manuscript to. Those names can be checked out as well. They might lead somewhere.”

He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.

“But we must have people on the ground in Hamburg, sir,” I added. “That’s still the best way forward.”

Pritchard was cleaning his spectacles with his handkerchief. “I was in Bremerhaven once, years ago. Not my favorite port, I must say.” He inspected the glass of his spectacles for dust and smears. “Submarines terrify me—I’d hate to be cooped up in a metal tube, all those feet below the surface, not knowing if, all of a sudden
—wham!”
He took an empty card folder from a drawer in his desk. “Well done, Hal. How’s the limp?”

“Getting better all the time, thank you, sir.”

“You’ll keep an eye on the STG share price, yes?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Maybe I should buy some shares myself.”

He grinned.

Later that week, I fell ill. It was a severe bout of flu but I was bad enough to have to stay in bed for two days. And so, very quickly, I came to rely on Lottie, who was, of course, at home looking after Will. He moved around the flat in spurts now. Having just learned to walk, after a fashion, his habit was to run faster than his coordination allowed, so that every few paces he fell over and he would bawl out for a few seconds. Then, when no one took any notice—Lottie was very good like that—the bawling stopped, grunting and panting took over, and the serious business of getting back upright was begun, while he babbled to himself in some incomprehensible protolanguage. Whisky steered clear whenever these commotions were in progress.

I lay in bed, doing my best to sleep through his noise. I had a mild fever but nothing serious enough to trouble a doctor with. When Sam came back from school, she was alarmed to find me home and in bed on the first day, and fussed over me as if she were a nurse and not a teacher.

“When any of us caught the flu in Bristol,” she told me, “we were given a sip of whisky, hot water, honey, and lemon juice. It made us sweat and sometimes it worked.” She smiled. “That started to annoy our father, too. He said it was a waste of good whisky. Can you imagine anything more beastly, putting himself before his young daughters. What a man!”

Lottie came in very useful that day, I have to admit. Sam had found her first days at school harder than she had anticipated. Not hard physically, but hard emotionally. Unlike in Middle Hill, several of the children at the new school, St. Paul’s Ladbroke Grove, had lost fathers in the war. As a result, they were disturbed, their families were broken, and poverty was an issue that it had never been in Middle Hill. Children arrived at school unwashed, unfed, and, in one or two cases, unshod.

“They’re bewildered, Hal. You and I and Izzy have a problem understanding this war—think what it must be like for them. History, literature, and mathematics seem pretty useless, a long way from real life.”

“Why not try some war poetry on them?” I said. (This was before I fell ill.) “One of the women at work is forming a collection—let me get some references for you.”

“Oh, Hal, what a lovely idea. There’s quite a good bookshop in Notting Hill—if you get me a few titles, I’ll know what to ask for.”

But the next day I was busy with the STG business. Then I fell ill, and so hadn’t been able to keep my promise.

That night Sam cooked me some broth and gave me another finger
of Bell’s, hot
water
, and honey—though there weren’t any lemons in the shops. I couldn’t finish all the soup but the toddy went down in no time, and helped me sleep. Sam slept in a different room that night. I could understand, but I missed her. I was getting used to sharing a bed with her and not just because we were now man and wife in the full sense. We both found it comforting. I know because I overheard Sam and Lottie talking about it one time.

The next morning when I woke up, Sam had already left for school.

I still didn’t feel good, and I had a bad headache, but I knew from past experience that I would feel a whole lot better if I had a shave. Nursing my head, I got out of bed and went through into the corridor. The bathroom was two doors along, beyond the lavatory. There were no locks on any of the doors and, too late, I realized the bathroom was already occupied. Lottie had just stepped out of the bath and was toweling herself dry. As the door opened, she stopped rubbing herself and just stood there, totally naked, looking at me.

Then she stepped forward and kissed me.

Though undeniably flattered by Lottie’s attentions, I was also profoundly shocked, and shied away as fast as I could, retreating to my bedroom—unshaven—where I remained for the rest of the morning. Lottie did not pursue me.

The next day, Lottie herself went down with the same flu bug I had—and so did Will. The entire population of the flat in Penrith Mansions, save for Sam, was laid low. Lottie wasn’t shamming. I heard via Sam that her nose was streaming, her joints were aching, and she had a fever—all the symptoms I had. Amid this chaos, of course, Sam had to take some days off from work and minister to the rest of us.

It never rains but it pours, they say, and while the flat was little
more than a ward in a hospital, Sam’s second sister, Faye, turned up. I didn’t know it at the time—I was still ill and the news was kept from me. Only when I was on the mend, and the variety of voices and other noises in the flat could no longer be kept from me, was I put in the picture. As with Lottie, Faye had lost her job. As with Lottie, she had been unfortunate. She had worked in a park in North London, as a gardener, but the park had been requisitioned by the army for the duration, as a munitions and supplies dump, and the park was a garden no more. As with Lottie, Faye had been living in rented accommodations, her wages had been too low for her to build up any savings, and there wasn’t much call for gardeners in central London in wartime.

One of the voices I had heard when I had been recovering from the flu, and knew that changes were happening without knowing what exactly, was male. This was explained now, in that Faye had arrived with her boyfriend, Tony. Tony was in basic training and about to be sent to France at any moment. He and Faye weren’t living together— he was stationed in some barracks just off Sloane Square, which was an added reason why Faye wanted to live with us, to be near her man. All of which meant that Tony was at the flat as much as possible. That made five adults, plus Will and Whisky. What had been a flat, then a hospital ward, was now more like a railway station.

Here’s the thing, though: I enjoyed it. Put it down to growing up with parents who were distant, or to the fact that I was besotted with Sam—whatever the reason, I
liked
living in a railway station. I didn’t mind that the bathroom was permanently occupied and decorated with so much drying laundry that it put one in mind of flags at a regatta, or that the gas meter ate shillings as fast as Will acquired scratches and bruises.

By the time Will, Lottie, and I had recovered from the flu (Sam, miraculously, never succumbed), days had passed since the incident in the bathroom. Lottie and I never discussed it, and there was no repeat.
Part of me wondered what, exactly, Lottie had meant by her gesture, and pondered what one sister would do to another, but I never pursued the thought.

Faye, as I think I’ve said, was the second oldest of the four sisters. (Ruth, thank God, had a good job—as senior seamstress in a uniform factory—so there was absolutely no chance she would be asking to join us at Penrith Mansions.) Tall and slender, Faye lived life out loud. She was passionate, or at least emotional, about everything—about men, about children, about makeup, about politics (she was an ardent socialist), and, inevitably, about the war. Which meant that Faye was the one sister who had—or at least voiced—strong feelings about Germans as the enemy. She kept these feelings under wraps, as best she could, when she was in the flat, and I never could tell whether she approved of Sam and me living together. But, once or twice, I caught her looking at Will in a way that suggested she didn’t entirely approve of Sam’s behavior. She never said anything in my presence, not at the time anyway, but then she was living in a room that I was paying for, so she was very careful—polite and considerate—where I was concerned.

Tony’s presence didn’t help. He was a couple of years younger than me and came from Essex. He had shiny black hair, kept firmly in place by too much cream for my taste. He was slight and his uniform always seemed a shade too big for him—the arms of his tunic too long, the neck of his shirt collar too loose. Whenever I was in the flat he questioned me closely about the war, about what the Front was really like, what the casualty rates were, where exactly I had been hit and what the pain had been like and how long it had lasted. I came to the conclusion that he was frightened.

“Don’t say that!” said Faye in her typically emotional way. “You make him sound like a coward.”

“No, Faye.” We were in the kitchen when this exchange took place,
where Sam was cooking and Lottie and I were shelling peas, before lunch. “Being frightened is the only sensible reaction to this war. It will make him respectful, careful… and it may well keep him alive.”

That Tony was frightened was reinforced when he came round one day not long afterward and said, in a subdued way, that his unit had been earmarked for France and had been told to be ready to ship out in ten days’ time. He took Faye out dancing that night, they came back late and very obviously drunk, and he stayed the night. I didn’t know whether he was breaking the rules of his unit, in staying out overnight, and it certainly wasn’t my job to interfere, but when they appeared the next morning, a Sunday, they were engaged, and so everything was forgiven. Faye had a ring and I said that, provided Tony wasn’t thrown in military jail for staying out overnight, we would have a celebration that evening.