Starshine (33 page)

He droned on but Jim closed his eyes and pretended to snooze. He had never wanted to get involved in all this anniversary pomp, only to go back to Oostbeke and complete his mission. The two had coincided, however, and the local branch of the Legion – his old branch – had been so insistent. Ah well, never mind. It would soon be over.

They arrived at their modern hotel in Ypres in time for him to take a proper nap. The town, of course, was quite unrecognisable, although he was told that they had rebuilt the centre more or less exactly how it was, with a Grand Place and a new Cloth Hall. Trouble was, he couldn’t remember how it was before the Germans had shelled it to bits. Now, Pop – he
could
remember that! No time to go there, though. Maybe just as well …

He and Lynda were taken early to meet the other veterans and be filmed and photographed at a British War Graves cemetery just outside Ypres. There, Jim looked with awe at the rows of white
stones – remarkably similar to that which he had had made for Bertie so long ago – and then with an even greater sense of wonder up to the east, up the gently sloping ground to the blue-fringed line that formed the distant horizon beyond which lay the village of Passchendaele. What was once the Salient, a place of death, destruction and horror, was now smiling farmland, intersected with green hedges and dotted with terracotta-roofed farmhouses. Apart from the cemeteries and the place names – Hellfire Corner, Geluveld, etc – there was no sign that this was once the most concentrated killing field that Europe had ever known, the place where he had watched Black Jack Flanagan drown … He jerked his head back and did his best to answer the banal questions of the television interviewers. What was it like to be back? It was fucking awful, that’s what it was like. But he didn’t say that.

Later, at 5 p.m., he and Lynda were among the veterans who were cordoned off under the huge white stone pillars of the Menin Gate to hear the Last Post sounded by the blue-uniformed buglers of, bizarrely, the Ypres Fire Brigade. Thank God they were allowed to sit during the interminable speeches by the mayor, other local dignitaries and a bemedalled British major general. Then they were given dinner at a restaurant – Lynda loved it because she sat next to the major general – and Jim had to confess that the food wasn’t bad, although too much for him at his age. There was, however, a splendid light Fleurie, of which he drank too much, making him feel very queasy during the night.

Nevertheless, he was up early the next day and, much to Lynda’s disgust, was standing waiting and shivering in the car park as the Renault drew up. He pretended to doze again on the journey, because he did not want to talk about why and where he was going. Why should he? It only mattered to him, Polly and Bertie, and now, only
to him. He knew Lynda had some idea of where they were going, of course, but not about The Letter.

It took some time to find the little church because Jim could not remember its name and it had been nearly seventy years since his last visit. But eventually they found it for it had not changed, except that, instead of old cottages, it was now surrounded by new municipal housing.

‘We’re going to see the grave of your old comrade, Granddad, I suppose?’ asked Lynda, who had been discreetly silent throughout the journey.

‘That’s right, love. Bertie Murphy. He used to live two doors away in Turners Lane.’

‘Just a sentimental journey, then, is it?’

‘I suppose it is, but p’raps a bit more than that.’ He looked about him, remembering a dark night when Bertie had been unknowingly escorted by the military police on his last journey. ‘I think it’s down there in that far corner. The driver needn’t come.’

He and his granddaughter moved slowly through the churchyard to the far corner. When he walked he jettisoned one of his two sticks and hung onto Lynda’s arm. The lilac tree had gone but, heart-warmingly, Bertie’s headstone stood out well, although its colour had darkened. The grass had been cut on the grave itself and some wild flowers had been recently cut and put into the urn at the foot of the grave. Someone was still looking after it, although the French widow must surely now be dead.

At the grave, Jim turned to Lynda. ‘Don’t think me rude, love, but I would be grateful if you would leave me alone here for a bit. Do you mind?’

‘Of course not. I’ll go back to the gate. Don’t try and come back by yourself. Just give me a shout and I’ll come and get you.’

‘Thank you, lass.’

He waited until she had moved away and then, balancing on his sticks, looked at the headstone. The carved lettering did not stand out as clearly as he remembered, but he admitted that was to be expected.

‘Hello, old lad,’ he murmured. ‘Sorry it’s taken such a time to come back and I suppose this will be my last visit. But I’ve got a bit of news for you, that I just had to come here to tell you. Listen to this, son.’

Hooking one of his sticks over his arm, Jim fumbled for his glasses, adjusted them and then took out the buff-coloured envelope, opened it and took out the single sheet of paper within.

‘This is addressed to me, Bertie, and it’s from the bloody Minister of Defence no less. Listen, he says:

Jim removed his spectacles, put them in their case and replaced them in his pocket. ‘What do you think about that, then, you old bugger? Bertie, lad, you are no longer a coward and a deserter – not that you ever were – and I am only sorry that it has taken so long.’

He stood for a moment longer, with his head bowed. Then, very, very slowly he bent down so that he was kneeling at the side of the grave by the headstone. With his fingers, he made a small hole in the grass and then the soil underneath it. ‘Here, Bertie. You have this. You deserve it.’ And he carefully folded the letter and slipped it into the hole, covering it with the displaced soil. Then he hauled himself up by the headstone and regained his feet.

He called, ‘Lyn, can you come and get me?’

Jim Hickman died seventeen days later, in his bed at number 66 Turners Lane, the house he had lived in for most of his life. He had caught a cold in Belgium – the Salient had claimed him at last – and it had developed into pneumonia. Lynda was by his side, holding his
hand, as he passed away and she immediately called her sisters from their tasks downstairs.

They rushed up and all three knelt by the side of their grandfather, tears trickling down their cheeks.

Amy eventually looked across at her elder sister. ‘Did he say anything before he went, Lyn?’ she asked.

Lynda sniffed into her handkerchief. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was only a whisper but I caught it. He said, “Ah, starshine.” Wasn’t that a funny thing to say?’

Virtually all of the characters mentioned in this book are fictional and bear no relationship to any soldiers who fought in the First World War. Field Marshal Haig and the politicians Asquith and Lloyd George are the obvious exceptions.

Bertie Murphy's number, 906372, I plucked out of the air, although, to give it some veracity, it bears some resemblance to those of soldiers court-martialled for desertion in 1917. I apologise if, accidentally, I have stolen that of a brave man of the period.

I grew up in the thirties with the Great War, as it was called, hanging over the heads of me and of my family like some retrospective thundercloud. My father was the youngest boy in a late-Victorian working-class family of fourteen – seven boys and seven girls. All of the boys went off to fight in the trenches, they were all rifle and bayonet men, not support soldiers, and, miraculously, all of them survived.

My father, Leonard Wilcox, went over the top as an infantry sergeant on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme and was almost immediately severely wounded by a shell burst, which riddled his body, particularly his lungs, with shrapnel. He spent hours in a shell crater and those wounds eventually turned into tuberculosis – then incurable – and he died in 1945.

My Uncle Ernest won the Distinguished Conduct Medal, like Jim Hickman, and became a temporary Regimental Sergeant Major at the ridiculous young age of twenty-four, ‘because there was no one else left.' Uncle Bernard, also a sergeant, lost an eye but won the Military Medal, also like Jim.

Uncle Alfred, the oldest of the quartet and yet only a lance corporal, came back to a shattered marriage but wearing the medal of the highest decoration in the British Services, the Victoria Cross.

The reader will understand, then, that the First World War has haunted me, not only as a boy wondering about whether he would have had the courage, like his father and distinguished uncles, to have gone over the top unhesitatingly into the German wire and machine-gun fire, but also as a latter-day novelist, writing about the wars of Empire in the late nineteenth century. I felt unable to write about the Great War earlier for various reasons, but now I am happy to have done so. The monkey, so to speak, is off my back.

Three hundred and six British and Commonwealth soldiers were executed by firing squad during World War I, usually for desertion and cowardice. My own necessarily brief dip into the files of such cases at the Public Records Office in Kew, London, showed that many of those shot were genuinely ‘hard cases' who had absconded before. It should also be said that the commanders-in-chief, Sir John French, and later Field Marshal Haig, who always had the last word on such matters, commuted the sentences of no less than 899.

Nevertheless, the story of Bertie's trial and death is not so out of the ordinary. James Crozier, from Belfast, was just sixteen when he was shot. Before his execution, the boy was given so much rum that he passed out and had to be carried semi-conscious to the execution post. Private Abe Bevistein was also aged sixteen when he was found guilty of deserting his post. Just before his court martial he wrote home to his mother:

The edict of the Duke of Wellington that courts martial should be considered as a form of deterrent was very much adhered to during the war and, on 13th January 1915, General Routine Order 585 was issued which basically reversed the civilian code of being considered innocent until found guilty. Under the Order, a soldier was guilty until sufficient evidence could be provided to prove his innocence.

At the end of the war, however, there was a general feeling of unease about courts martial and the Darling Committee was set up to investigate the system. It reported that ‘we consider … that the work of courts martial during the war has been well done.' It tinkered with peripheral improvements but no fundamental changes were recommended.

As the years passed and more was learnt about shell shock, that disquiet increased. It culminated on 8th November 2006 when the Labour Government included in the Armed Forces Act a retrospective pardon for all those army personnel executed in the 1914–18 war. I anticipated this, in Bertie's case, by ten years in what I hope is a pardonable piece of poetic licence.

A more outrageous piece of time distortion, however, – at least to those who know their British musical history – has been indulged in by me in terms of Bertie's (and my mother's) favourite musical,
The Maid of the Mountains.
It opened, in fact, in Manchester on 23rd February 1916 and then, after some rewriting, re-opened for a long run at Daly's Theatre in London on 10th February 1917. Bertie could not therefore have seen it with Polly in 1915. However, I so desperately wanted Bertie and his girl to go there together for his first leave that I have created the deliberate time-warp. I hope that making this confession here and explaining the reason will excuse me for perpetrating this solecism.

Starshine
is a novel, a work of the imagination, but in pursuit of accuracy I have loosely based several, although not all, of the action sequences in the story on the experiences of men who fought in the war and who put their own tales down on paper at the end of it. My description of Jim Hickman's attack on the machine-gun post and his ‘bombing up the trench', for instance, parallels in many ways the citation that accompanied Alfred Wilcox's award of the Victoria Cross in 1918.

Any inaccuracies in the tale, however, are my responsibility alone.

– J.W. Chilmark, 2012.

I owe a debt to my father and my six paternal uncles who all fought in World War I – as related in my Author’s Note – for what they did, but the debt does not extend to the modesty which accompanied them in later life. For none of them talked about their experiences to the family, not even Uncle Alf, who won the Victoria Cross. That was no help at all to a novelist, but they weren’t to know that I would become a scribbler, for they all died well before I was an adult.

Nevertheless, those experiences hung around them like some indefinable aura and as a boy I read everything I could grab about that tragic conflict. Much of that sank into my brain and, although the titles of the books have long been forgotten, the stories remained and I have drawn on them, to some extent, in writing this novel.

More to the point, however, I refreshed those memories with more contemporary reading and I must thank the authors of the following books for providing much of the detail of the campaigns and the fighting:

I must also, however, thank the staffs of the London Library and the Public Records Office at Kew, who helped me to dig back into the past. So, too, did my old friend Jim Farrand, to whom this book is dedicated, who drove and walked through much of the old Salient to the east of Ypres with me, as we both tried to imagine how such a fertile and rural area could have been so horrific a killing ground for four years, less than a hundred years before.

Let me also express my gratitude to the editors at Allison & Busby for picking up and remedying so many of my sloppy errors of detail. And, as ever, I must record my thanks to my wife Betty, loyal and loving proofreader and research assistant and, for her constant support, my agent, Jane Conway-Gordon.