The Black Mountains (54 page)

When morning came, an orderly brought Jack a message.

“Nurse O'Halloran says would you give her love to Hillsbridge.”

At once, Jack was wide awake and sitting up.

“Nurse O'Halloran? Where is she?”

The orderly shrugged. “Gone off duty an hour ago. I came on just as the night staff was leaving.”

With an effort he hid the sinking of his heart. He'd been right to think she was avoiding him. She'd left, and she hadn't even come to say goodbye.

“Thanks for the message,” he said. And knew that as long as he lived, it would be a sentiment he would remember with aching poignancy.

IN THE April of 1918, Hillsbridge was buzzing with two pieces of news. The first, that Alfred Church, the Co-op secretary, had died of a stroke, was accepted philosophically enough. Mr Church was not much liked. But the second affected almost everyone, for it was a new development in conscription. With so many killed, the army was in desperate straits, and the thing that everybody had said was impossible happened—the collieries were told to send their quota of men to war.

“How will they decide who's to go?” Charlotte asked James. Nowadays only the young and foolhardy were anxious to enlist for what seemed like certain slaughter.

“They'm going to have a draw, down at the Victoria Hall,” he told her. “It's the fairest way, they say—ten men to go from each pit.”

“A draw for their lives, dear God!” Charlotte said, and then, as the thought struck her: “What if our Jim's name gets drawn out?”

“It won't.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he won't be put in,” James said calmly. “He's a married man with children. They haven't got to the stage of calling them up yet.”

“That's all right, then,” Charlotte said, and wondered what had happened to her that she no longer cared whose sons went to France as long as her own were safe.

On the morning of the draw, all roads led to the Victoria Hall. Jack, who was home from London and going a little further on his crutches each day, said he would go down with James to see what happened. Harry wanted to go too, but Charlotte said it was no place for him, and they stood in the doorway watching the men go down the hill.

Over the whole of Hillsbridge there was an atmosphere of something momentous happening, and the square in front of the Victoria Hall was swarming with people. Jack wasn't sure if he could manage the steps to the upper floor where the draw was to be held, so he stayed outside, sitting on the seat, while James went up to the main hall.

It was easy to see at a glance which of the men had their names in the hat. They jostled together pretending joviality, outrage and nonchalance. But caught unawares, they looked afraid, twisting their caps between nervous hands.

The draw began, and such a hush fell on the hall that Jack could hear every word clearly through the open windows. They took Grieve Bottom Pit first, calling the numbers and names of the ten who had to go, and then continuing until every name was drawn out, so that there could be no accusations of fraud, or names left out of the draw.

Then it was the turn of South Hill Pit, and the first name out of the hat was Ewart Brixey, Redvers' older brother. One by one the other names were called, men Jack knew, all of them, and suddenly he wished he hadn't come. How many of them would never come back? How many of these familiar names and faces would pass into the realms of people he had once known?

He stood up with difficulty, swinging himself away from the open windows, the list of names echoing like some obscene roll-call, and his mind went to Stella, in France. Would she nurse any of these men? If so, even now, he would willingly change places. There were even times when he thought it had been worth being wounded to have met her. But then it seemed all so pointless—all such a waste.

Jack spoke to one of the men standing on the steps, who had been unable to get into the main hall. “ Tell our Dad I've started walking home,” he said, and turning his back, he swung off along the street.

NOT LONG afterwards, Jack learned that he had been awarded the DSC—“the price of a leg,” Charlotte called it—but in spite of her threats to dump it in the rubbish bin, he knew she was as proud as he when he went to Buckingham Palace for his investiture by the King.

“What did he say to you?” she asked, over and over again, never tiring of Jack's anecdotes, and he knew that if he told her the truth about what he really thought—that the King must be sick to death of the endless procession of servicemen presented to him to be honoured—it would only spoil it for her.

“A son of mine at Buckingham Palace, and shaking hands with the King,” she would mutter to herself. It was a supreme accolade, which she took personally and of which she never tired of thinking about. All Hillsbridge now treated Jack like a hero. The
Mercury
glowed with praise for him, and his brothers too—”this patriotic family,” it called them, and there were photographs of Ted and Fred taken from earlier issues and even a rehash of Fred's exploit when he had cycled with the telegraph message under heavy fire.

“If it weren't for the Halls there wouldn't be no paper this week!” Charlie Durrant grumbled, but he was pleased too, because he had the distinction of living next door to someone who had won the Distinguished Service Cross.

But as the cheering died away, the atmosphere in the town was a sombre one. Battered and bruised by the happenings of the last four years, they had almost given up hope of it ever ending.

“It's the modern-day Armageddon,” Caroline Archer said to her friends in the sewing and knitting circles, and for once, no one felt like disagreeing with her.

IT ENDED on a pale November day when the sun shining through the bare trees turned the wet streets to liquid silver. Its death warrant was signed in a railway carriage that had once rattled through Europe with the noblest of passengers. By communiqué and order, notice of its impending demise was passed from front to front across the countryside it had shattered and beaten to a bare and bloodied wasteland.

In England the news broke with surprising suddenness, bursting on tired ears like a bright mountain spring, then gathering force as it rushed and tumbled onward to become a great, joyful torrent, sweeping away doubt and despair like dead leaves caught in its foaming tide.

The war was over. The killing had stopped. At eleven o'clock the maroons had been fired. And the boys would be coming home.

As the whisper became a shout, people rushed into the streets, delirious with joy, waving flags, hugging one another, and dancing. Fire crackers exploded on the railway lines, bells pealed in church towers the length and breadth of the land, and in London crowds flocked to the palace in the hope of catching a glimpse of the King. They packed into motor buses and taxis and even military lorries; going nowhere in particular, they were too relieved and excited to care where they ended up.

The war was over. No more bombing raids. No more rationing. No more black-edged telegrams. The war was over, and the Kaiser had fled like the coward they had always known him to be. And the shout of triumph that went up was so infectious that even the children, too young to understand, joined in.

For too many, of course, the victory had come too late. In Hillsbridge alone, there were fifty-three men and boys who would never come home again. And there were plenty more, like Jack, and Colwyn Yelling, and Evan Comer, who would carry the scars with them to their graves.

The war was over, let it die. But never, ever, let humanity forget what suffering and slaughter it had caused, or what courage and comradeship it had revealed.

The war to end all wars, they had called it. With God's grace, it would be just that.

On the heels of the Great War came the influenza epidemic, and people went down like flies. Whole families, their resistance weakened by years of rationing, succumbed, and the Halls were no exception.

On the first Saturday in December, James, Jack and Harry were all confined to their beds. At lunchtime, Charlotte, bringing them mugs of weak tea, was taken ill almost without warning. The vague stirrings of nausea she had been trying to ignore all day suddenly overcame her, and she collapsed in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs. Roused from their sick beds by the noise, the others groped their way downstairs to find her lying in a pool of spilled tea and broken china.

They got her to bed, although she protested weakly, and one of the Clements boys was given a threepenny bit to run up to Captain Fish's and bring either Dolly or Amy home. Dolly was indispensable, so Amy came, not very pleased at the role of sick nurse.

“Hasn't anyone wondered if
I
might get the influenza, walking right into it like this?” she inquired plaintively as she filled her father's stone water bottle with hot water and placed it against his back.

“You won't get it, Amy,” Charlotte said with certainty. “Apart from your accident, I don't believe you've had a day's illness in your life.”

“That's because I'm like you, Mam,” Amy replied, and as she hurried out of the room, Charlotte stared after her, smiling to herself. Amy like her? Yes, perhaps she was. Except that I'm getting old, thought Charlotte, and the realization chilled her in much the same way as the realization had chilled Jack that his leg had gone forever. Old age was something that happened to other people. Bones might ache, she might get tired more easily, and the face that looked back at her from the kitchen mirror might have more lines. But inside she felt like the woman she had always been.

“I'm only forty-four, and I could still have another child if I was daft enough,” she told herself. But when every move was such an effort it left her dizzy, limp and shaking, Charlotte found herself more conscious of her mortality than she had been at any time since she had been expecting Harry. Her own mother, she remembered, had died when she was only thirty-two years old, and the aunt who had brought her up, and who had seemed such a very old woman to her at the time, could not have been much older than she was now.

As for James …

Charlotte cast a sidelong look at him, wheezing in the big double bed beside her. There was an unhealthy pallor to his skin that she did not like, and it heightened her awareness of her own age. They had been young together. Now, he was a sick and broken old man who would struggle through a few more years' work at most before succumbing to the inevitable and wheezing out his last years in his favourite chair with the open fire for a spittoon.

But what we did together, James! she thought. What we did together! We made a home and raised a family, and none of them has done anything to disgrace themselves or us. That at least is something to be able to stand tall and say. Each one of them has done us proud, in his own way. And if I can't help feeling that Jack is mine and mine alone, you were still a father to him, James. Nothing can take that away from you, not even me and my silly notions.

She lay back against the pillows once more, drifting in the hinterland that is midway between sleeping and waking, and when the first sounds of the commotion downstairs edged into her consciousness, she thought it was part of her dream. She moved her head restlessly on the pillow, blowing the stale taste of sleep out of her mouth and wishing she could move without aching in every bone. But the noise persisted: Nipper barking, raised voices, Amy's high and hysterical tones, and another voice that if she hadn't been dreaming she would have thought …

“Mam, Mam, are you awake?” It was Amy in the doorway. “Mam, Dad, there's someone to see you!”

She sat up then, aches and pains forgotten. But she still thought for a moment that the figure framed in the doorway was part of a delirious imagining. Her bunched fist found her mouth and slowly opened like the petals of a sea anemone to mask her face. And only then did she speak.

“Ted!” she said, her voice muffled by her fingers. “Ted, what are you doing here?”

He came into the bedroom smiling. “What a way to greet me after all this time! Not much of a home-coming, is it?”

His voice was exactly as she remembered it and had heard it a million times in her mind while he had been away, but oh, the look of him … The cheekbones seemed about to protrude through the fair skin, and the eyes, blue as ever, had a haunted look about them that had not been there before. But as she stared at him above the tips of her splayed fingers, her heart seemed to burst in her throat, and weak tears rose in her eyes.

“Hey, Mam, that won't do!” he chided, laughing but embarrassed. “And, Dad, too—is he asleep or what?”

Charlotte swallowed her tears and reached over to shake James awake.

“Wake up, Dad! Our Ted's here! Look, it's our Ted home! Would you believe it!”

James, bleary and congested, rolled over to face the door, and then with an effort pulled himself up in bed as Charlotte had done.

“Our Ted?” he echoed incredulously.

Suddenly the small room was full of people. Amy, who had followed Ted upstairs, her face wreathed in smiles, Jack, who had hopped in from his room, Nipper going quite crazy despite the fact he was white around the whiskers these days and a bit stiff in his back legs, and even young Harry, still poorly but anxious not to miss a single moment of the excitement.

Ted reached out to ruffle his hair, and Charlotte noticed with a painful start that even his hands were thinner, the nails grown too long and the veins standing out in blue ridges.

“Oh, my boy, just look at you!” she said, her voice thick with emotion.

Ted pulled his cap off and tossed it on to the bed in a gesture that was almost defiant.

“Well, at least I'm alive, Mam,” he said.

The statement sobered each one of them with the exception of little Harry, for it reminded them all too sharply that Fred would never be coming back. But almost as one they closed their minds to the sad thought Fred might be gone, but Ted was here, and they were not going to let anything mar the moment of his home-coming.