The Black Mountains (19 page)

“Go across the fields,” Charlotte suggested. She had taken seriously James's remark about the pallor of Jack's face.

Jack did as she said and found it worked quite well. It was pleasant, sitting in the long grass with a book—as pleasant as any of his studying could be now that the pressure was on.

As he had confided to James, he was nervous about the examination. So much depended on it! From the moment he woke in the morning, he thought of nothing else, and even when he was asleep it must have been on his mind, for he became restless, tossing and turning and waking before dawn. His brothers ignored him, Amy did her best to distract him, and even Sarah complained that he hardly ever seemed to visit her and the baby. Sarah was particularly fond of Jack, and always had been. But finally the day to sit the exam arrived and there was nothing more anyone could do but pray.

All the family had become so engrossed in Jack's future that they hardly gave a thought to the events stirring in Europe. The newspapers were shouting the most alarming headlines, but Sarajevo was just a foreign name they couldn't pronounce, and the Austrian Archduke who had been murdered there seemed as remote as Father Christmas. Even when ultimatums began to be bandied about between countries, they refused to take it seriously, even Charlotte, who had seen her father go off to fight the Boers. It was said that there couldn't be a war, that the weapons were too terrible and the losses would be too high on all sides. In any case, it had nothing to do with miners and farm workers, except perhaps a few reservists like Frank and Ern Eyles, the police sergeant's sons, who had gone marching off in uniform, with their kit-bags on their backs.

So, while Churchill talked of mobilizing the fleet, Charlotte set her mind to cleaning up a second-hand leather satchel Mr Davies had offered Jack, and when the Germans were marching into Luxembourg, and France was demanding to know if Britain would stand by her, the Halls were more concerned with counting the days until the exam results were announced.

But at last, at the beginning of August, the result came through, and they all went wild with joy. A pass!

“I knew he'd do it,” Charlotte said, conveniently forgetting the doubts that had been plaguing her, and James shook his head slowly from side to side as if he could hardly believe it.

Even the neighbours came in to congratulate him—Peggy, beaming and asking Jack if he'd still pass the time of day with her when he was at the grammar school, Walter Clements and Ada, muttering and nodding their pride at living next door to such a successful scholar, and the Brixeys, promising to buy him a pint next time they saw him in the Miners Arms.

“There'll be moths in their wallets if they wait till then!” James commented drily, for Jack was no drinking man, and never would be.

As for William Davies, he was thrilled—‘like a dog with two tails,' as Charlotte put it. When he'd finished patting Jack on the head and congratulating him, he turned to Amy.

“You'll be the next, miss. You could do well, too, you know, if yon put your mind to it.”

“Oh, one at a time, Mr Davies!” Charlotte pleaded.

And James said, with a snort, “A girl? It would never be worth it, even if we could manage it.”

Amy looked hurt, and William Davies ruffled her hair affectionately.

“Ah well, she's got this year to make up for the one she missed. There's time yet, plenty of time.”

Only Jack said nothing. Relief was so enormous he wanted to shout with it, or soar and fly like one of William Davies's butterflies. But he kept it inside himself, so that it ran through his veins like warm, bubbly treacle. He was going to be a pupil/teacher. And nothing could stop him now.

Afterwards, history would record third August as the day when Sir Edward Grey made his important speech to the House of Commons and the machinery for the Great War was set in motion. But to Jack, it would always be the day he learned he had passed his Oxford Junior.

And although, as Sir Edward had said, “The lamps were going out all over Europe,” for Jack, one small lamp had brightened his life, and it would never go out again.

CHARLOTTE heard the news of war as she raked the hot embers out of the bake-oven next morning, and prepared to stack the loaves of bread for baking in its warm interior.

Charlie Durrant rounded the corner of the rank at a run, waving a newspaper and shouting at the top of his voice. At first, Charlotte, who could not hear what he was saying, thought he had taken leave of his senses. She had pushed the last loaf into the oven and slammed the door when he ran up to her, moustache quivering with excitement.

“Whatever is it, Charlie?” she asked.

He pushed the newspaper towards her, stabbing at it with an eager finger. “ Haven't you heard, then? We're at war! Twelve o'clock last night we declared war on Germany!”

War fever gripped Hillsbridge as it gripped the rest of England.

The Mothers Union, under the guidance of Caroline Archer, started a sewing circle to make warm clothing for ‘our brave soldiers,' and not to be outdone, Martha Durrant and the stalwarts of the chapel organized knitting bees.

As for the men, they were wildly jubilant, treating the war as a glorified glove fight or football match, and cheering from the sidelines.

“Kaiser Bill's in for a shock if you ask me,” Moses Brimble remarked to a group of regulars in the Miners Arms one evening towards the end of August. “If he thinks he's going to eat his next Christmas dinner in Buckingham Palace, he's got another thing coming!”

“We'll soon show him what's what,” Hubert Freke, long past being able to show anyone anything, predicted confidently.

“Well, now Kitchener's in charge of the War Office, we will.” James Hall put in.

There were murmurs of agreement from the other men sitting in a loose circle around the tables. Lord Kitchener was a popular figure, whose name still held magic, and already Colwyn Yelling, Evan Comer and Jacob Cottle's son, Bert, had responded to his first appeal for 100,000 men. In spite of fierce opposition from their parents, they had been among the first to join the queues at the recruiting office, and were now drilling on Salisbury Plain.

“It'll all be over by Christmas, anyway,” Hubert Freke went on. “The boys won't see nothing of no fighting, if you ask me. The Navy will take care of it all—see if I'm not right.”

There were a few mutterings of dissent from the other men. As an old naval man who had seen service in the Boer Wars and actually sailed on the
Bacchante
with the King when he was still Prince George, Hubert was known to favour the Navy as the answer to everything. But to most of them, the big ships were slow, unwieldy instruments of war compared to the guns of the modern army. If it came to a real dogfight, with Kaiser Bill trying to get into Britain by the back door, maybe it would be useful to have a few gunboats in the channel to send him off with a flea in his ear. But for fighting and winning, the English Tommy would take some beating.

“You know they're having Stanley Bristow's horses?” Jim Hall said. Since the baby had been born, he had become a regular in the Miners Arms along with his father, for although Alex was a good baby most of the day, he seemed too fond of crying in the evening, for Jim's liking.

“Stanley Bristow's horses!” Moses exclaimed.

“I bet he's in a way about that. He looks after those horses like his children. Still, like I say, 'twon't be for long,” persisted Hubert Freke.

“Let's hope not, anyway,” Reuben Tapper, porter on the Somerset and Dorset railway, remarked. “ The government are supposed to have taken us over, but they don't know what the'm doing, and that's a fact. If we don't soon get back to normal, there won't be a railway left—not one that's worth having, anyway.”

The men continued to drink their beer, pushing all harbingers of doom and destruction to the back of their minds. They did not want to think about the uncomfortable change in the pattern of their lives. They discounted it, as they had discounted the threat of a food shortage. They had no way of knowing that the German Army was swarming up over the flat Belgian countryside, sweeping everything before it.

So they drank and laughed, not realizing that the bitter straggle ahead would affect each and every one of them, and mean the end of a whole way of life.

THEIR jubilation did not last long. It was shattered with the news of the first Hillsbridge casualty—Jacob Cottle's son, Bert.

Charlotte was in the County Stores when she heard of it. It was her afternoon for serving behind the counter, and she was weighing up dried fruit for Martha Durrant and trying to avoid being talked into knitting socks for the soldiers.

“I've got enough work of my own to do, Martha,” she was saying, when Amy came bursting in, breathless with the news.

“Mammy, what do you think? Mrs Cottle's had a telegram—Bert's been killed!”

Charlotte went cold. She stood, paper bag in one hand, scoop of sultanas in the other, and felt for a moment as if the ground had rocked beneath her.

Bert Cottle—young Bert? Killed? It couldn't be true!

On the other side of the counter, Martha Durrant had gone white, and Charlotte knew she was experiencing the same feeling of disbelief.

“Why? How?” she asked foolishly.

“Oh, Mammy, I don't know,” Amy's voice was impatient “It was only a telegram.”

“Then how d'you know it's right?” Charlotte asked.

“Because Mr Cottle said. I heard him tell Mr Brimble. And he looked really strange. I think he'd been crying.”

“Dear Lord,” Charlotte said “ Bert Cottle. Well, well, our Jim's going to be upset about that.”

They stood in silence for a moment, still stunned by the news. Then, with a quick, determined movement, Charlotte folded down the top of the sultana bag.

“How many pairs of socks did you want me to knit, Martha?” she asked, matter-of-factly.

They continued discussing the knitting circle then, and when Charlotte had finished serving Martha, she suggested to Amy that she might as well take Harry home with her. But when they had gone, she lost concentration. It was incredible. Bert Cottle dead! She could remember the last time she had seen him, swinging along the rank and whistling ‘Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland.' Well, he was in dreamland now, poor lad.

Everyone in the town was shocked by Bert Cottle's death, even those who did not know him. The
Hillsbridge Mercury
carried a full report, under a banner headline: L
OCAL
M
AN
D
IES AT
Y
PRES
. And there was a photograph of Bert, smiling proudly under his military cap.

The town read the report with growing dismay. Bert's unit, the North Somerset Yeomanry, had been sent to Ypres, or ‘Wipers' as they called it, and after two days and two nights in the trenches, Bert had been killed by a coal-box shell. Five other men had been hit by the same coal-box.

The horror of it was almost beyond belief, but there was more to come. Within a matter of days, news was received that Colwyn Yelling had been wounded, with shrapnel in his shoulder and a badly damaged arm, and was being shipped back to hospital in Portsmouth.

As soon as Peggy heard he had arrived, she arranged to go down to see him, and when she returned to Hillsbridge, with his terrible stories of the fighting in France fresh in her mind, she was almost beside herself with worry.

“He saw Bert Cottle killed,” she told Charlotte, sitting white-faced in the Halls' kitchen. “He says it's sheer hell out there. The Germans have got some sort of guns—Jack Johnsons he called them—that'll make a hole twenty feet deep and thirty feet across. You can't imagine it, can you? That's bigger than your kitchen and mine put together! And the towns, he says, are smashed to matchboxes. People are having to leave while their homes burn and take to the roads with all they can carry in carts and wheelbarrows. He says it's like being in heaven just to be in hospital.”

“I don't know what to say, Peg.” Charlotte was worried to see the usually strong and capable Peggy so upset “You stay there, and I'll put the kettle on for a cup of tea.”

But even then, horrified though she was, the war did not seem real to her. For life in England was much the same as it had ever been.

Autumn had turned to winter beneath rain-heavy grey skies, the leaves had fallen from the trees to lie in sodden heaps in the gutters. In spite of the knitting bees and the newspaper reports of fighting and the fund that Jack's school at Wells had set up to send plum puddings for Christmas to the boys at the Front, she found it hard to imagine that beneath the same grey skies a land across the Channel was ravaged and desolate, tramped over, burnt and blown-up, and she did not have the time or energy to try.

So when the stories began to circulate about the German spies infiltrating the country, she dismissed them as fanciful and foolish. And when James came home one evening and told her the latest suspect was Algie Smith, the manager at the County Stores, she almost laughed in his face.

“What are you on about?” she demanded, looking up incredulously from the boiled bacon she was slicing. “Mr Smith, a German spy? He comes from London.”

“So he says,” James said cryptically. “ But the story as I've heard it is that his name isn't Smith at all. It's Schmitt. And his wife's foreign. You can't deny that”

“She's Dutch,” Charlotte said. “ She comes from Holland.”

“She's not likely to admit being a German, if she's here to spy,” James argued.

“But they were here before the war started!”

James wagged his head knowingly. “Planted here, in good time, so that when it all started, nobody'd think it were funny, them coming.”

“Well, I think it's the silliest thing I ever heard,” Charlotte said, resuming her slicing of the bacon. “ Mr Smith's no more a German than you or I.”