Starshine (7 page)

Bertie wrinkled his nose. ‘Why don’t you leave it to the generals to worry about that?’ he asked. ‘Personally, I’m just going to concentrate very strongly on staying alive for a bit, without worryin’ about grand strategy an’ all.’

Over the next few hours, the position at the top of the ridge descended into a kind of stalemate, with both sides reluctant to make a frontal attack. But the superiority in numbers and firepower of the Germans began to tell and casualties began to mount among the British. Dusk, then, was welcomed by the defenders lining the ridge and as soon as darkness fell completely, whispered orders were passed down the line to retreat in sequence down the slope.

Jim Hickman gave up a silent prayer as they passed the rough trenches they had dug and continued to march down towards the plain, not wheeling to the right, to his relief, to resume their previously vulnerable positions at Nun’s Wood, but continuing until the ground was level beneath their feet. Eventually, they were halted at newly preserved defensive positions at what he guessed would be roughly halfway between the ridge and Ypres. Here the trenches were comparatively sophisticated, deep enough to offer some protection from shellfire and were shielded, to some extent, by two lines of wire.

‘Thank God for that,’ said Jim. ‘Someone’s been thinking for once.’

‘And have you heard the rumour?’ asked Bertie.

‘What’s that?’

‘The King of the Belgians, no less, has used his brain and has ordered that the slush gates, or whatever you call ’em …’

‘Sluice gates?’

‘That’s just what I said. Anyway, the things have been opened on the canals to the north of Wipers, lettin’ in all the North Sea, would you believe it. They say that the water is about half a mile wide and has stopped the German’s advancing and has made the town safe from that side. It’s too deep and wide to cross, so the Belgian troops facin’ them have been able to come across to help us out in the middle, so to speak.’

Hickman frowned. ‘Sounds good. But it will also free lots of the Boche to move over here against us.’

‘Ah, Jim lad. You’re right. I never thought of that. You just can’t win in this bloody war, now can you?’

Hot meals miraculously appeared via the shortened supply line and the refugees from the ridge were fed. Guards were posted and they were allowed to sleep until stand-to at dawn. No further attack was mounted by the Germans, however. It was as though the enemy were content to have forced back the British line and were themselves taking respite from the bitter fighting that had marked the last few days.

A veneer of civilisation in the form of regular meals, only intermittent shelling and the occasional bursts of machine-gun fire now returned to the two comrades as they settled into line duty in the trenches, standing to at dawn, taking their turns as lookouts on the fire step and, once, joining a young subaltern in an uneventful night patrol in no man’s land. They both undertook the duty of writing home.

‘Are you writing to Polly, then, Jim?’ asked Bertie.

‘Yes. Would you like me to send her your love?’

‘No, thank you very much. I’m doing that myself, because I’m writing to her too.’

A slightly uneasy silence fell on the two and they returned to their letters. It was broken, inevitably, by Bertie: ‘It’s a bit funny, this, when you think of it, isn’t it?’

‘Funny? What do you mean, funny?’

‘Well …’ The little Irishman wriggled his bottom on the firing step. ‘I mean, it’s funny. Both of us together like this and loving the same girl and not … well … not bein’ jealous and such. Not mindin’, I mean.’

Jim sucked his pencil. ‘I suppose it is, when you think of it.’

‘I mean … Would you be glad if I was killed, see? And cleared the way for you an’ Polly and so on.’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Neither would I – if you was killed, that is. Funny, though, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

The two letters were given to the mail clerk at exactly the same time but neither knew the contents of the other’s. But Jim did ask Bertie a personal question that had been on his mind for some time.

‘You was only four when you left Ireland to come to Brum, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why then do you speak with as broad an Irish accent as I’ve ever heard? Growing up in Brum – you’d think you’d talk like me.’

Bertie scratched his head. ‘I suppose it’s me dad. Livin’ with him, I mean. And goin’ to the School of the Holy Mother. They’re all Catholics there, like me, of course, and though some of them are not Irish, most of them are. So it’s stuck with me.’ His eyes twinkled.
‘Personally, I think it’s what gives me me roguish charm. It’s why Polly loves me much more than she loves you …’

Jim gave him a playful punch in the chest.

‘Hickman.’ Captain Yates came down the trench, his arm in a sling. ‘You and Hawkeye here, get your stuff together. You’re going back down the line. You’ve been posted to a new Territorial battalion that has just arrived – part of the Warwicks. Sergeant Flanagan here has come to collect you and two others.’

The captain smiled at them both, a smile that seemed to take years off his age and make him look like the captain of the school cricket team, congratulating them for taking wickets. He held out his left hand. ‘I shall miss both of you,’ he said. ‘You are both fine soldiers, if …’ he grinned at Bertie ‘… a little eccentric. I have commended you for your action back up on the ridge, Hickman. Whether anything will come of it, I don’t know. But good luck to you both. Now, grab your things and off you go.’

They both shook hands with the young man and ducked away to find their meagre belongings. Then they joined the sergeant, who was waiting for them at the junction with the communications trench. He was a tall man, muscular and heavily jowled, wearing a Connaught Rangers cap badge and a forbidding scowl.

Bertie gave him a welcoming grin. ‘Sorry to have kept you waitin’, Sarge,’ he said.

For a moment, there was silence. Then Flanagan took two paces forward so that Bertie was forced to step back, so that he was pressed against the wall of the trench. The sergeant pushed his jaw forward and down so that his face was about an inch away from that of the little Irishman.

‘You say “sergeant” when you speak to me,’ he hissed. ‘“Sergeant”. D’yer hear, you little papist cunt?’ His accent, thick and guttural, was
heavy with Northern Irish prejudice and his spittle hit Bertie in the eye, so that he blinked. ‘Now
I’m
a regular soldier, not a part-time little fucker like the pair of you. You’ve been here just a few days. I’ve been whetting me bayonet in the service of the King for the last fifteen years. God knows why I’ve been put in with a bunch of Territorials but I can only think it is to smarten you up. So you’d better learn quickly that I don’t approve of undue familiarity with officers, like you two have just displayed, and you will learn to address NCOs correctly and …’ he looked down with disgust at Bertie’s tangled puttees and mud-spattered tunic ‘… you will smarten up, cunt, or I’ll have you on fatigues day and night for weeks on end, so that you’ll wish that you’d never been born.’

‘Sergeant.’ Hickman took a step forward.

Flanagan whirled round. ‘Don’t you dare interrupt me, Corporal. I don’t know how you got that stripe in just a few days wankin’ about in the trenches here, but I’ll have it off your arm in two seconds if you try to stand up to me, lad. Now. Follow me and don’t hang about. If you lose me, I will have you put on a charge of desertion – and that means a bullet in the early morning.’

He turned on his heel and marched away, so quickly that Jim and Bertie had difficulty in keeping him in sight at first in the crowded communication trench. Not once did he look behind him to see if the two were close behind.

‘Blimey,’ whispered Bertie. ‘I think we could be in trouble with this bloke.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll handle him. You’ll see.’

Bertie shot an anxious glance at his friend. ‘I’m not so sure, Jimmy. I’m not so sure.’

Mrs Victoria Johnson heard the letter box click and hurried over to pick up the two letters that fell on the doormat inside 64, Turners Lane. She smiled with relief when she saw the handwritten envelopes and called up the dark narrow stairway to her daughter: ‘Polly, two letters from Belgium. They’ve gotta be from the lads.’

‘Oh thanks, Mum.’ Polly took the stairs three at a time, sliding her hands down the rails on either wall, and swept up the letters. She turned and galloped back up the stairs, disregarding her mother’s cry, ‘You’ll be late if you start reading ’em now.’

She shut the door of her bedroom and sat on the edge of her bed, face flushed. To read them now, or save them for later …? Read them now, of course, then she could return to them at her leisure as the day wore on. So she tore open both envelopes, without withdrawing their contents, tossed them both over her shoulder so that they fell onto the bed behind her and then groped blindly to pick up whichever one
came to hand first. That way, she would show no favour to one of her boys before the other.

It was from Bertie and she grinned at the typically unscholastic, pencilled scrawl. It began by saying, without punctuation, that he loved her more than anything else in the world and that he and Jimmy had already been in action and that Jim had gained a lance corporal stripe. ‘He is a good soldier Polly so he is better than me.’ He had not washed properly for over a week and had a large hole in his sock. Would she tell his father that he would write to him later and would she then read that letter to him because, as she knew, the old man couldn’t do the writing and reading stuff? And he loved her more than anything else in the world.

She put down the single sheet of paper and wiped away a tear.

Then, a smile replacing the tear, she opened Jim’s letter. It was written, also in pencil – did they not have any pen and ink in France? – in his equally typical, forward-slanting hand. It began by recording chronologically their crossing of the Channel (the first sight of the sea for both of them), the journey to the front in open rail trucks, the march in darkness to the front and then a brief sentence outlining what action had followed. But, although he covered both sides of two sheets of paper, compared to Bertie’s one, there were no details – and no mention of the award of his lance corporal’s stripe, although he included a reference to Bertie shining as a marksman. They were, he said, looking after each other and were hoping soon for a period of rest away from the front line. Polly sighed as she looked in vain for some sign of affection. The letter, however, concluded only with ‘your affectionate friend, J. Hickman.’

She carefully replaced both letters in their envelopes, held them both to her lips, put them in her handbag and stood to complete her toilet. Looking at herself in the mirror on the marble-topped
washstand, she mouthed a prayer to God, asking Him to look after her boys. For a moment, she regarded herself critically. The face was long – too long and the chin perhaps a bit too square. But the cheekbones were satisfyingly high and the eyes shone this morning, now that she had heard from them. She pulled a green woollen dress over her head – the colour was supposed to match her eyes but it was too dark, she knew that now – shook her hair free and brushed it quickly. She applied a little face powder and rouge (no lipstick; at eighteen she felt still a bit too young for that and, anyway, she disliked its artificiality), grabbed her bag with its precious cargo and launched herself down the stairs, two at a time.

‘For goodness’ sake, girl,’ chided her mother. ‘Sit down properly and eat your bacon sandwich.’

‘No time, Mum. Can you wrap it up for me and I’ll eat it on the tram?’

Mrs Johnson sighed. ‘That’s no way to have your food. Give me a minute, then, and drink your tea. What did your letters say? Are they all right?’

Polly nodded, picked up a cup and took a sip. ‘Yes. Jim’s got a lance corporal’s stripe already and Bertie’s shot a sniper, whatever that is.’

‘Golly! Ah well, everyone says they’ll be home by Christmas.’

‘No, Mum. For goodness’ sake, it’s November now and it looks as though we’ve lost two battles already.’ Polly read the
Birmingham Mail
closely and she knew that the BEF and the French had been in severe fighting. It was clear that the Germans were not going to be the pushover that ‘everyone’ had claimed. ‘It’s not going to be as easy as that,’ she said, struggling into her coat. ‘Can’t stop.’ She grabbed the sandwich in its waxed-paper covering. ‘Thanks. See you tonight.’

Once on the tram, she wolfed down the sandwich, pulled her coat
around her against the cold of the morning and read both letters again, snuggling around them as though they themselves would keep her warm. Then she tucked them away carefully and looked unseeingly out of the window, her mind once again addressing the question that consumed most of her waking moments: which one?

Immediately, Bertie’s face appeared before her, his red hair tumbling over his forehead, his round face grinning and those ridiculously blue eyes looking into hers with a love that was unquestioning and promising her a warmth that she could feel even now, on this cold November morning. Bertie was no sleeping volcano. On the contrary, he erupted every time the two were alone – which was rare, in that the three of them had been inseparable until, that is, the Kaiser had marched into Belgium. The little Irishman made no secret of his love. He proposed a future with him that waved aside the unimportant matter that he had no proper job nor qualifications that might bring security or prosperity. Of course, he had not proposed marriage. He simply insisted that they would marry when she was ready to have him and, in the meantime, the trio would continue to live in warm proximity and he would press his lips to hers and fondle her enticing breasts whenever they were alone. Ah, Bertie … She smiled and brushed away the tear that came whenever she thought of him, warm, passionate and vulnerable out there, in the trenches. She just hoped that Jim would be able to look after him …

Jim, ‘her affectionate friend’! Jim: tall, quiet, capable, deep. The only time he had kissed her was on the platform at New Street Station when she had waved them goodbye. Then, when Bertie had pushed her lips apart and thrust his tongue through to mingle fiercely with hers, Jim had kissed her hard but chastely on the lips and held her tightly, but briefly. How strange that the fates had thrust the three of them together, living cheek by jowl through childhood. Jim, so very
different from Bertie, and yet just as attractive in his own way. He would enfold her in his competence and equally deep love. Oh, she knew that he loved her, even though he never said so. Women knew these things. She swayed as the tram traversed a line crossing on its way up Newtown Row. When was it that she realised that her feelings about them had changed from that of admiring chum to something more warm and deeply unsettling? And why had they both emerged
equally
as potential lovers
at the same time
? She sighed. It would have been so much easier, so much more
convenient
, had one or the other surged ahead in attraction. But no. They marched together in early manhood, as in childhood and teens, as her boon companions; inseparable, the only men she could ever contemplate giving herself to – the only men she fiercely
wished
to give herself to. But damn and blast it, she couldn’t have them both! Which one, for God’s sake?

Then her heart lurched as she realised once again that perhaps God would take that decision for her; that a German bullet or shell would kill either one of them or even, horror of horror, kill them both. She bit her lip. She had two much older brothers serving somewhere in France, yet the thought of losing them brought nothing like the agony of being parted from Jim and Bertie. For a moment she felt guilty about that. Then she turned and looked at the shopfronts rattling by and shook her head at her reflection in the tram window. She could not feel ashamed at facing up to her preference. She loved the two of them with a passion that could not be suppressed.

Polly had left school at thirteen – the same infants and junior school where she had played tomboyishly with her two boys – and she had been an undistinguished scholar. Yet she was no fool. Possessing a strong imagination, she had consumed all the news about Germany’s strong naval and military build-up with a growing dread. It would lead to war, she could see that plainly. And the assassination of that
remote archduke at Sarajevo was merely the accidental spark that fired the conflagration. It would be war and her two boys would fight in it.

She had not for one moment subscribed to the popular myth that it would be a short-lived affair, over in a few short months. The build-up of forces in Germany, France, Russia, Austria and, to a lesser extent, in Britain, must surely lead to a more titanic struggle, lasting for two years, at least. Please God her two boys would come through it safely, leaving her with this sweetly agonising decision to take when she was older and, of course, wiser.

Polly reported for duty at the Beehive, the old-fashioned drapers in the heart of Birmingham where she worked, only two minutes late. Not enough to earn the disapproval of Mr Bulstrode, the stout and stern general manager. She knew that she had a credit balance with him, for she was good at her job – better, in fact, much better than the stately spinsters whom the world had passed by and who made up the rest of the staff serving in the shop. For Polly not only knew all the merchandise – prices, quality, quantity – intimately, without having to consult the cards, but also had a fashion sense that could advise the customer at the other side of the counter about which cloth and colour would be right for her and the drive to sell it to her with charm. Ah yes, Polly knew that she would be allowed the odd indulgence, for she was irreplaceable.

Yet, after five years of loyal service in the Beehive, Polly was becoming restless.

The war was going to continue, she knew that. The men were going to the front now in increasing numbers. Kitchener’s giant, moustached face loomed at her from hundreds of posters, urging young men to answer the call of King and country. There was, as yet, no balancing call to women, for they could not fight. But perhaps
that would come, in some way or another. She fretted through that day as she sold cotton reels, strings of bright ribbons and packages of knitting wools. This was all so unimportant, so
peripheral
. Her boys were doing their bit. Why shouldn’t she?

As five-thirty came and she headed home, she remained two stops on the tram beyond her normal destination and alighted near Kymestons, the gloomy factory in Witton where she knew that munitions were made. At the weekend she had walked by and seen a notice, advertising the need for workers. She had paid no particular attention to it and therefore had no idea if it was only men they needed. Surely it would be, for women were never used for this kind of work. But perhaps the call to men to join Kitchener’s Army had had the effect of reversing that policy? She therefore felt a thrill of expectation as she hurried through the drizzle to the work gates.

The notice remained. It made a direct call to patriotism:

Polly tingled. War work! What did Kymestons make? She had no idea, but Jim had written about being subjected to German shelling. How appropriate if this company made shells – shells that would help to counter the German bombardment and make Jim and Bertie safer. She could do nothing more appropriate to help them. It wouldn’t matter that she would get her hands dirty and work longer hours. She was tired of being ladylike in a fusty old shop, dealing with matrons who didn’t know a mauve from a magenta. This would be striking
out for a new kind of independence; something that would match the sacrifices that Jim and Bertie were making out there, in the Flemish muck and fire.

She made a resolution and immediately spun on her heel and walked back to Turners Lane with a new sense of purpose. There was no chance of gaining time off from the Beehive to apply for the job, so tomorrow she would just have to be ill. And become a war worker!

She decided that she would tell her parents nothing of this, for they still cherished the thought that by working in a respectable draper’s shop Polly had attained complete fulfilment. So she left at the usual time the next morning but dressed with rather more care. She explained to her mother that the fact that she wore her best hat – a black straw boater trimmed with red roses made of gauze – was ‘just for a change’ and pulled on her best white gloves from her bag once out of the house. As an afterthought, she had put a copy of her birth certificate in her bag.

It was easy walking distance to Kymestons and, on arrival, she stood outside the grimy building for a moment. Her eye followed the high grey-brick walls that fronted directly onto the street and seemed to march for miles. There was no break in them, apart from the open iron gates where she stood, and the place looked more like a prison than a workplace. She licked her lips and felt immediately that her sweet little straw boater was out of place. Then she settled her shoulders. To hell with it! They would have to take her as they found her: determined.

A commissionaire wearing what surely must have been Zulu war medal ribbons directed her to an office entrance and Polly found herself speaking through a hole in a glass partition to a severe woman wearing spectacles.

‘You are applying for work?’ the woman asked, eyeing the hat with disapproval.

‘Yes, please. I want to do war work.’

‘We do not take young ladies under the age of eighteen.’

‘I am eighteen. I have my birth certificate here.’ (What a stroke of luck that she had the foresight to bring it with her!)

‘Very well. Please wait on that bench over there.’

It was all of ten minutes before a door opened and a large, bluff man in a khaki-coloured duster coat bustled through. ‘Yes, good morning, Miss … er …?’