Gifts of War (6 page)

Wilhelm’s photograph of her had been in black and white, of course, but in the flesh, in the blaze of sunlight that swept in through the open French windows of the headmaster’s study, she was not so much black and white as gold and white. Her hair, the fine down on the lobes of her ears, on the angle of her jawline, on the smooth expanse of her arms, glowed gold, formed a frame of gold dust against the ivories and creams of her flesh and her open-necked shirt.

I can’t say that our first meeting was a resounding success in terms of conversation, but I remember the word that came into my mind to describe her. She was mouthwatering.

I did notice that she seemed a bit cold-shouldered by some of the staff, but I thought nothing of it, not then anyway.

Although our first meeting was not all it might have been, I
thought I had time on my side and was not unduly worried. The authorities at Stratford had been a bit miffed when I had told them that I was taking that Tuesday off and most of the time the rules were pretty strict. After all, there was a war on and the government was paying for the course. But when they had found that I was giving a talk at a school, about the war, their attitude softened and I was forgiven.

We worked long hours—nine till six-thirty—but we did get Thursday afternoons off and so the next Thursday I sat in the smoking room of the Lamb, reading. Although the bar was closed, so far as the sale of alcohol was concerned, we residents could use the room to read in, or write in, to talk in, or even doze in. The smoking room had a bay window that enabled you to look along the street. I was thus conveniently placed to keep the school entrance under surveillance and to observe, unnoticed, all comings and goings. I took the opportunity to taste the first of the cigars I had been given by Wilhelm at the time of the truce.

It was raining that day and the knot of mothers waiting for their children outside the school was smaller than usual. The news from the war was not encouraging just then. This was the time when the Czar in Russia had dismissed his chief of staff and tried to run the army himself—catastrophically. I’d had a letter from my sister in London. She was threatening to come and see me in Stratford. “You can’t help win this war in the boondocks, you know. There can’t be many German submarines in the river Avon. Come to London … there’s room in the flat and it will be just you and four girls!!!!!” Izzy had always been fond of exclamation marks. “It’s my favorite punctuation!!!” she would say when she wrote to me at school. Underlining came a close second.

Three-thirty arrived. The children emerged, and the knot of
mothers dissolved. Ten more minutes passed. I recognized one or two teachers hurrying home, a brave one on a bicycle.

Then I saw Sam. She was wearing a navy blue raincoat, not so very different from those a lot of children wear, and a navy blue sou’wester hat. She looked very young. But the blue of her outfit emphasized the blond of the hair that fell about her shoulders.

I let her go by the Lamb before I slipped out the side door. I stood under the arch at the side of the pub, out of the rain, and watched as Sam stepped into the grocery shop halfway along the Wellesbourne Road. She emerged a short time later, carrying a small parcel, but as she left the shop she turned and shouted something I didn’t catch. Although I didn’t hear clearly what was said, I sensed that Sam was upset as she hurried off, running across the road and turning right beyond the fountain where the market stalls were pitched on Tuesday mornings.

I followed at a distance. The rain was insistent rather than heavy, but there were few people about. I reached the corner and looked down Newbold Lane. There were houses on either side and at the far end the lane rose where it crossed the canal and then the railway line—the station was at the far end of the village, beyond a warehouse belonging to a local brewery.

Sam was on the bridge and disappearing over it. As soon as she was out of sight I hurried forward, not easy in the rain and given my limp, though the pain was getting easier day by day. Just as I reached the bridge a train rattled by, its smoke and steam billowing out either side of the engine, like a set of old-fashioned whiskers. The locomotive was slowing on its approach to Middle Hill station and for a moment the carriages obscured my view ahead. As they disappeared westward, however, I suddenly saw Sam again. She was standing on the far side of the canal at the door of a lockkeeper’s cottage, and she had
inserted a key into the keyhole. She had turned, to watch the train, but that meant she was facing away from me and didn’t see me watching her. Then she let herself into the cottage and disappeared.

I walked on. I could have asked almost anyone in the Lamb where Sam lived—it was a small village—but I didn’t want to advertise my interest in her. Beyond the canal and railway, Newbold Lane became much more of a lane than a road, narrowing to accommodate single-file traffic only, and its surface was more primitive, too—loose gravel. The lane led, I knew, to a pig farm and very soon would become lathered in mud and worse. The rain was heavier than before but I was well wrapped up and I resolved to walk as far as the mud before turning back. I was going to knock on Sam’s door—no time like the present—but I wanted her to get home, get out of her wet clothes, and relax first, before I arrived. I didn’t want her preoccupied when I made the little speech I had planned.

My mind went back to the war. Recently the French had made a series of attacks on the Germans but had been rebuffed. One of the problems was an overall lack of strategy. General Joffre, commander in chief of the French forces, was a law unto himself and that only meant that the Allies, as a fighting unit, were less than the sum of their parts. It couldn’t go on and a summit was planned. The sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska had just been killed in a charge at Neuville-St.-Vaast.

The mud on the road was thickening, as was the smell of pig. The shine on my shoes was definitely under threat, so I turned round. I was now walking into the rain, which sliced against my face like grains of shrapnel. As I came within sight of the bridge again, my heart did a somersault in my rib cage. A woman was walking along the towpath, away from the lockkeeper’s cottage. Was Sam going out again so soon? Had I missed her on my way to and from the pigs? Then I realized that the woman on the towpath was not Sam, and was probably no
more than fifteen. In fact, I recognized her as one of the girls who sang in the Middle Hill church choir.

She had her head down because of the rain and didn’t see me. I let her get well out of sight; then I climbed down the steps off the bridge and continued on to the towpath. In the distance a narrow boat was gliding slowly toward the lock gates but it was minutes away. The raindrops pelted the surface waters of the canal in tiny explosions.

I reached the cottage and pushed at the low gate. The hinge complained in a soft whine.

I stood for a moment at the door before knocking. Did I really want to do what I was about to do? I heard a kettle whistling and I thought I heard a baby crying somewhere. Suddenly the smell from the pig farm wafted across the meadows and shook me into action.

I knocked on the door.

After a delay, Sam appeared. “Oh!” she gasped, obviously as surprised as I hoped she would be. “Oh.”

“I hope I’m not intruding,” I said softly, taking off my hat, despite the rain. Cold water sluiced down the back of my neck.

“No, oh no.” She had on a striped apron. “Put your hat back on, please, you’ll get soaked. How did you know where I lived?”

“They know everything at the Lamb,” I lied, putting back my hat.

I noticed that she didn’t ask me in. Was someone else there? I’d come too far to pull back now.

“I wondered… there’s a dance in Stratford on Saturday, I thought you might like to go.”

She looked at me without blinking.

“Well,” I said, “I know dancing is not exactly my strong suit, not with this leg, but… there’ll be lots of people, a bar, music … it’s a change from village life. What do you think?”

She bit her lip. “I can’t go out, not at night anyway.” Then she added in a half whisper, “No, not nights.”

What did she mean by that? That she didn’t want to go out
at all?
That she didn’t want to go anywhere with
me?

The pig smell intensified.

I tried again. “We could always go to Stratford for lunch, walk by the river. Visit Shakespeare’s grave—though I’m sure you’ve done that.” It sounded lame.

But she was nodding. “Yes, yes, I’d like that. The river there … it’s where—” She trailed off, but I knew what she’d almost said. It was where she and Wilhelm had courted, back in the spring of 1914.

That told me… not a lot, exactly, but enough for now. Don’t rush your fences, I reminded myself.

“How are you on motorbikes?” I said.

“What?”

I raised my voice above the rain. “I have a motorbike.”

“Oh no, far too dangerous. I mean, I’ve never been on one, but I’ve seen them. They go so fast—thirty miles an hour even. Oh no. Especially now that—” She checked herself, and I didn’t press it.

“Let’s take the train,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the station at eleven-thirty.”

“You don’t want me to come for you here?”

“No. Meet me at the station at half past. Don’t worry, I won’t be late.” She half-closed the door. It was clear that this was a dismissal. She smiled, closed the door fully, and immediately opened it again. “Thank you,” she said in a whisper. And then the door was closed a second time.

I have said next to nothing about my German course at Stratford. Housed in an old agricultural college on Wood Street, the language school had been operated as a private outfit in the days of Wilhelm Wetzlar, when its chief job was to teach German and other languages
to graduates who had obtained a scholarship to study at European universities, such as Göttingen, Heidelberg, Paris, and Bologna. And to teach English to foreigners. On the outbreak of fighting, the War Ministry had taken it over. The school now taught interpreters, interrogators, propaganda people, translators, budding spies, would-be diplomats—anyone with a gift for languages whose talent might come in useful at some stage (there was no
strategy
so far as I could see). There were
fewer
women in the course than I’d expected after reading the Ministry of War brochure I had been sent by the London bookseller. The men were mainly army, with a few naval types thrown in. One or two were, like me, injured.

The “Ag,” as it was called, was built on three floors and must have been quite old, for it was very short of staircases. In fact, had it not been for the war, I am sure it would have been closed down as a fire risk. There were, naturally, no lifts and only one of the new telephone machines: in the office belonging to the director of studies, so it was hardly accessible. Built of stone, the whole building echoed—a cough barreled down the corridors like the clap of a shell at the Front. The canteen, on the ground floor, stank of brown food—brown soup, brown meat (though that’s being kind; it was often gray), brown onions, brown sausages. Fortunately, Stratford was well endowed with pubs. A cricket team had been formed but my limp ruled me out other than as an umpire, which didn’t appeal.

Because of my two years in Germany I was entered in the senior course of advanced technical German, learning specialist scientific, economic, geographical, and military terms. The idea was that, with my military experience and my language proficiency, I would eventually be attached to the general staff of some forward unit, translating captured documents or even interrogating prisoners. I didn’t object: it would impress my father and seemed useful enough work for a wreck with a limp.

I settled in fairly well, the only problem—which we all faced— being a certain Major George Romford, second-in-command and director of studies. He had a blue chin where, however close he shaved, the follicles fought back, giving him a stubble that never quite went away. He had a mustache like a brush, which, I suspect, camouflaged a harelip. And he had the largest Adam’s apple I have ever seen—it must have been the size of a duck’s egg. Whenever he spoke, it did a jig in his throat and I couldn’t take my eyes off it, except to notice that his shoes could have been shinier.

Major Romford was an old-fashioned class warrior who had been born into a docker’s family in the East End of London and, to his credit, had worked his way up. He had obtained a brilliant degree at London University, spoke three languages other than English, and looked upon anyone who hadn’t been born in the rough end of town and gone to his beloved “school of hard knocks” as a weakling in need of building up through a regime of being pulled down. The translations, pronunciation, and sentence construction of someone like me were never good enough for George Romford, even though we both knew that I spoke German with a better accent and a greater natural fluency than he did, which was a cause of bitterness on his part. (He had learned his German in school and had never been abroad, so it wasn’t surprising that I had the better accent and usage, but that of course never came into his calculations.) He particularly hated me, not only because of my superior accent and because I hadn’t grown up in a tenement or the workhouse but also because I had my own transport and so could get away from the college (and him) with unparalleled speed and efficiency. I spent my time at the Ag dodging Romford and avoiding his eye whenever he gave a class. He was particularly smarmy in his dealings with women, and that didn’t endear him to me either.

Despite this drawback, I did learn some technical German on the
course, enjoyed it, and even found some books on German science and history in the Stratford library that helped fill me in on the general background to the technical terms I was learning.

On Saturday morning Sam and I met as arranged on the platform of Middle Hill station. (There was only one platform for both the “up” and “down” trains.) She was on time as she had promised; I bought the tickets and we stood awkwardly together, waiting for the train. The sun was out, the birds were near deafening, and though I felt awkward I was in a good mood. I’d been for a walk that morning (my limp was improving all the time) and had picked a buttercup for my buttonhole.