The Black Mountains (27 page)

“No, but… oh, Mammy, it just reminded me, that's all,” she sobbed. “ Mr Davies said today he's starting a scroll at school for all those old pupils that have been killed, and I thought how awful it would be if…”

She broke off, covering her face with her hands, and they all knew exactly what she had been going to say.

“Oh, I don't know why he had to go!” Charlotte said, plonking the teapot down with such force that tea spurted from the spout and splashed on to the tablecloth. “There was no sense in it”

“No sense at all,” James agreed, and Amy wailed again.

“Oh, Mammy, he won't be killed, will he?”

Her only answer was Harry drumming his spoon on his plate as he waited for his food, and Amy went on: “Supposing we were never to see him again—ever!”

“Oh, Amy, be quiet, do!” Charlotte snapped. “I expect they'll let him come home before they send him off to France.”

Harry, thoroughly frustrated by the delay, now gave a hearty kick to the high chair standing at the corner of the table. He didn't use it any more, but Charlotte had kept it for Alex, whom Sarah had brought over that afternoon. It had spindly legs and was easily tipped, and under Harry's well-aimed onslaught it toppled over with a crash.

When Charlotte had righted it, smacked Harry, and sent Nipper out, James said thoughtfully, “ How would you all like to go and see our Fred?”

“See Fred?” Charlotte repeated. “How could we?”

“Well,” James said slowly, “ I was thinking we could hire a motor car.”

“
What?
”

Even Jack, who was home this week, and was on the settle with his nose in a book, looked up in amazement.

“Us—hire a motor?” she said again. “Oh, James, don't talk so silly.”

“I'm serious,” James said stoically. “ Didn't I tell you young Cliff Button is setting up in business?”

Charlotte looked hard at him, still wondering if he was joking. Since most of Stanley Bristow's horses had been requisitioned for the army, there had been a shortage of transport in the town, and Cliff Button's motor would fill the gap. But it had never entered her head that they would hire it, even for short journeys. And as for going all the way to Fred's camp on Salisbury Plain—it seemed an incredible idea.

“But it's a long way.” she said. “It must be fifteen or twenty miles.”

“Motors can really travel. We ought to be able to get there in an hour.”

“Oh, James, do you think we could?”

“It's up to you, Lotty.”

“Oh, Mammy, say yes! Say yes!” Amy was hopping up and down, her tears forgotten.

“We'd have to find out what it would cost,” Charlotte said cautiously, and then, abruptly, “No, why should we bother about the cost? Whatever it is, it'd be worth it to see our Fred. How many will it seat, James?”

“I wouldn't like to say for sure. I should think perhaps six of us—and the children, of course.”

“That's us,” said Amy, prodding Harry.

“Well, there's four of us here,” Charlotte said, counting. “If the boys are able to come, that is. And then there's our Dolly, and Jim and Sarah …”

“When would it be?” Ted asked.

“A Sunday, I should think. We're all here on Sundays, except Dolly. And you never know, Captain Fish might give her the day off, if she explained why she wanted it. Even
you're
here on a Sunday, Ted, though it's about the only time you are.”

“I don't know that I should want to go anyway,” Ted said.

“Not to see our Fred?” Charlotte was indignant “ Well, that's a fine thing, I must say! The trouble is, you've got your mind on this girl of yours and nothing else.”

“Oh, all right, count me in,” Ted said hastily.

On the day of the trip—the last Sunday in March—Charlotte was up early, making sandwiches and packing them into a picnic box she had borrowed from Peggy. And for once it was no effort to get the family ready in time. Except for Ted who had had yet another late night with his concert party.

When the large black motor turned the corner, doors and windows opened up and down the rank. The children crowded round, eager, but afraid to get too close, and Nipper ran away down over the gardens in fright.

“Don't worry, I'll give him some scraps at dinner-time,” Peggy said. “You just go off and have a good time.”

While Jack and Ted climbed into the front, and the others into the back, Cliff Button put his back into cranking the starting handle and after a few vigorous turns, the engine spluttered into life, making the motor shudder as if it were about to explode. Cliff leaped back into the driver's seat, and with a crashing of gears they were off.

They passed Martha Durrant on her way to chapel and waved to her. The look of sheer amazement on her face made Charlotte and the children laugh so much that they immediately forgot their nervousness.

“I expect Martha thinks we shall go straight to the devil!” she said.

And from his lofty position in the front, Ted remarked, “I'll tell you this, Mam, I shouldn't want to go to heaven if they're all like Mrs Durrant up there!”

The car bounced over the first level crossing and turned left into Westbury Road. Between the two sets of lines and the river, the road ran past the newspaper shop that always fascinated them because the back of it was built on stilts in the river and into a hill almost as steep as their own. The car shuddered and slowed so that they thought it would never make it, but miraculously it did, and soon they were out in the open countryside, bowling along a grey ribbon of road between green fields.

When they had passed through the market town of Frome, they knew they must be almost half-way there.

“So this is Salisbury Plain,” Charlotte said, taking in the avenues of trees in new and tiny leaf that gave way to grassy slopes, stretching away as far as the eye could see and broken only by clumps of stunted, windswept bushes. And in spite of the purpose behind their trip, she felt the weight in her heart lighten.

Here, on the plain, a new season's life was unfolding beneath a clean, washed-blue sky. Even in the chuntering motor, she could feel the peace of it, and the promise of the perennial rebirth of vitality and fresh, singing life, and it filled her with hope. Here, the whole of nature was proving that life rises, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the greyest December day. And in it there seemed to be a message for mortals hell-bent on destruction.

Then they rounded a corner, and suddenly the peace was no more.

The training camp had been built on the side of a hill and just outside a village, several meadows given over to hutments and bell-tents. As Cliff Button pulled into the side of the road and stopped, an army vehicle emerged from what had once been a farm track, raising a cloud of dust from the road that was more used to hay-wagons and threshing machines, drawn home from the fields by plodding shire-horses. And in a flat field nearby the road, a squad of men and boys in ill-fitting khaki uniforms was drilling untidily.

“Dear Lord,” Charlotte said, her sick fear returning.

When they met Fred, it became more of a reality than ever. In uniform, with the rough khaki accentuating the fine, scrubbed fairness of his skin, Fred looked younger than his nineteen years. But there was a glow about him that was timeless—and terrifying.

So have they looked through the ages, young men going to war, with their thirst for adventure heightened by an illusion of gallantry and heroism. Fred's uniform was that of an English Tommy, but his proud, glowing face might have belonged to a Crusader following the Lionheart to the Holy Land, or a Highlander fighting for the Pretender at Culloden Field. The rigours of training had done nothing to quench his fervour. He had not even begun to question the wisdom of the war lords who would use him as a tiny weapon in their armoury, one of an expendable, nameless mass of humanity who might, if he was lucky, live long enough to kill a German or two or, if he was not, stop a bullet or a piece of shrapnel.

Men like Fred lay dead in their hundreds for mile upon mile in front of the trenches in France, their bodies heaped as they had fallen because neither side could get out to bury them, and still the war lords used the survivors like human chess pieces. Armies were marched this way and that, meaningless strategies were attempted, and games of power were played out. But Fred neither knew this, nor cared.

He held his head proudly above his scratchy collar as he told his family of the training he was undergoing, of the marches across miles of open country to the rifle ranges, and the places earmarked for practice in throwing bombs. He straightened his shoulders unconsciously as he described the rifle and bayonet drill, and laughed as he told of the physical jerks and fitness tests, for his life in the pits had made him strong enough to regard most of them as games. And without a thought to the perils that lay ahead he looked forward eagerly to getting his chance to take a shot at the Kaiser.

There was something precious in that day with Fred. Pride and patriotism mixed with sadness, and flavoured with the urgency of a day stolen out of time. But when they left him, Charlotte felt drained, as if there was nothing inside her but a great, yawning emptiness. She wanted to take him in her arms and hold him the way she had held him as a baby, protecting him, and showing the world that to her at least he was special and irreplaceable. But she knew that now the time for pleading was over. She could best help him by being strong for him. So she left the tears to Dolly and Amy and kept her own emotions to herself.

As they drove back over the plain, darkness fell. The fresh promise of the day was forgotten as the sun went down, pale and early, behind the curve of green, and in the half light there was a cheerlessness about the grey and empty landscape. The darkness and the loneliness were a warning for the future, unwanted and inescapable, and Charlotte shivered, staring with unseeing eyes at the tunnel of light thrown ahead of them by the lamps of the motor.

“What's wrong, Mammy?” Amy asked, but Charlotte did not answer her.

“Let's have a sing-song,” she said.

Soon Ted was leading them in one music hall favourite after another, and the wind was catching the words and blowing them away, back across the plain. And if Charlotte felt she had left a part of herself behind, in the hutments under the hill, none of the others, except perhaps James, guessed it.

AS THE spring turned to summer, there was a new subject of conversation among the men in the bars of the George and the Miners Arms. Herbert Gait, the hated under-manager at South Hill Pit, was secretly calling on Molly Hamblin, the wife of one of the South Hill colliers. But as always, everyone but Wilf, the cuckolded husband, seemed to know about it.

“Ould'st think he could smell a rat,” Hubie Freke observed sagely, draining his pint and looking at the other regulars with rheumy old eyes.

“Ah, but the husband's often the last to find out, 'sknow,” Moses Brimble said.

“Or the wife!” Ewart Brixey put in wickedly, and the others chuckled into their pints but said nothing. It was common knowledge amongst them that Moses had had a fling with a girl at Purldown a few years earlier, but it was all over and done with now, and none of them but the hot-headed young Brixey would have been tactless enough to bring it up.

“I reckon it's scandalous,” Walter Clements said. “A man in Gait's position. It's taking advantage if you ask me. He waits till he knows the man's underground and out of the way, and then off he goes for an hour. Somebody ought to tell him.”

The men mumbled non-committally into their beer. Wilf Hamblin was known to have a fiery temper and no one intended to be the one to break the news to him that Gait was making a fool of him.

“If you ask me, it's a pity the army can't requisition Gaity like they did your horses, Stanley,” Ewart went on with a laugh. “ He could be our secret weapon. Just the stink of him'd be enough to kill off a few Germans.”

“Well, you've heard they've started using gas in the trenches,” James said, referring to the reports that were filtering back from the renewed fighting at Ypres, and the talk turned, as it so often did, to the war.

But the men did not forget about Gaity and Molly Hamblin. The talk spread in ever-widening circles until almost all the miners at South Hill knew what was going on. Only Wilf remained in ignorance.

“Gait's a lucky sod not to have had Wilf after him before now,” James said to Charlotte when he told her about it.

But not even Gait's luck could last forever. One morning, while working underground, Wilf got his hand caught between the tubs. It was not a serious accident, but bad enough to stop him working.

He took the cage to the surface, swopped his helmet for his cloth cap, and set off for home. The men on the screens who saw him go were agog. They knew that Gaity was missing from his office, and guessed that meant he had gone to visit Mrs Hamblin.

The Hamblins lived in Pit Cottages, two doors away from Jim and Sarah, so Wilf was able to get home within a few minutes, long before anyone could warn Gaity that he was on his way. Sarah, who was in the garden, cutting a cabbage for dinner, had a grandstand view of the whole drama.

“I couldn't believe my eyes,” she told Jim later. “ I saw Wilf come round the corner, and I knew Mr Gait was in there with Molly. The door was closed, and the windows, and I reckon they were upstairs. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't warn Molly. There wasn't time for anything.”

“You wouldn't have done right to warn her anyway,” Jim said sternly. “You're best off not meddling with other people's business, Sal.”

“I know, but I was really scared,” Sarah went on. “ He's got such a terrible temper, I thought he might kill him. I mean, for all that he's on the stout side, Mr Gait doesn't look very strong.”

“He's just a bully,” Jim said. “ Yes, carry on, Sarah. What happened?”