Towards Another Summer (17 page)

But the War, the First War . . .

 

 

 

 

Outside the Red Cross shanty hospital the wounded were arranged in neat rows, like schoolboys in dormitories under the sky, but they were nowhere, really, except on page fifty-three of the
History of the Rifle Brigade
. Grace could have turned the pages quickly to be rid of them. Why should she worry about soldiers wounded in the First World War when there were so many soldiers and so many wars?

The General was making his inspection. See, his bones picked clean resembled the bones of all other men, but take pity on him, restore his carpet of flesh, wrap him in it, erase all wounds; he is the General.

He addressed the men,

—If you are captured by the enemy what is the procedure?

A chorus from the wounded, their voices quavering like those of old old men,

—Name rank number, name rank number.

Grace was about to turn from page fifty-three to page fifty-five when one of the wounded, lying with his companions, so neatly arranged and lion-stamped, tucked into their narrow grey stretchers like supplies of standard eggs fitted into cardboard containers, wriggled himself up on his elbow, jerked his head high, dared to draw attention to himself.

Grace was powerless to turn the page until she had heard him speak. He said, in a cringing tone from which all pride had gone, strained, as it were, through the final perforations of reality,

—Notice me! Notice me! Tell the General to notice me, how badly wounded I am. Promise!

—I promise, Grace said.

As she was closing the book she heard him singing in a voice of hysterical gaiety,

Replacing the book on the shelf, Grace switched off the gas fire and went downstairs to the sitting room. Philip and Anne looked up as she entered. Philip’s eyes showed a mixture of sympathy and alarm, and Anne said hurriedly,

—Would you like a cup of coffee?

—Yes please, Grace said, and then explaining her absence, —I got caught with your father’s book,
The Story of the Rifle Brigade
. I’ve been reading for about an hour.

—You had the fire on, I hope?

Grace wanted to say, Why, no!, to make Philip and Anne believe that she was either too timid or too absorbed to turn on the fire, but she was a passionate seeker for Truth, whatever it may be, even in little things, and she would have the world without and the world within stripped of all deceit, in the way that the birds, flying down to seize the flakes of gold that covered the Happy Prince, had stolen his clothes, then his limbs, his jewelled eyes, his ears, his flesh until only his heart remained . . . one had to begin, carefully removing deceit layer by layer . . . there fore Grace answered,

—Yes, I turned on the fire.

She had not been too timid, too absorbed; it was an act, because she felt she did not measure up to their expectation of her; they had expected a witty, wise, intelligent guest; instead
they had this Grace-Cleave, as hyphenated as her name when it was spoken (intuitively) by little Sarah.

Yet she was indeed afraid, chiefly of thresholds and the human beings who might cross them; continually warned, she gave forth an offensive cloud of emotion and dream - timidity, absorption.

—Yes, she repeated boldly,—I turned on the fire.

She saw that, secretly, Philip and Anne wished she had not been so bold. They had been concerned for her - going to her room and staying there an hour or more without a word of explanation. They had wanted to be able to say, anxiously,

—Oh you should have turned on the fire to warm the room. You must use it at any time, Grace.

She observed their disappointment, their cautious pruning from their words of the anxiety that was not, after all, necessary.

—I’m glad you were warm enough, they said together.

—Was your father in the Rifle Brigade? Grace asked Anne.

—Yes. Look, I’ll make coffee.

When Anne returned and they had drunk their coffee, Grace pulled a book,
Modern Architecture
, from the shelves, and sprang with quick courage to her feet.

—I think I’ll retire. Goodnight.

—Goodnight, Philip and Anne said together, Philip adding, again as if there were some doubt about her appearing in the morning,

—See you in the morning.

—Yes, she said formally.

Dear Sir, with regard to your statement on the matter of Sunday morning, this is to confirm . . .

She would never learn; communication with people was more than a business letter; why could she not make it so? There were tears of rage in her eyes, rage at herself and the World, as tripping over insts, ults, res, and heretofores, she went upstairs to bed.

As on her first night at Winchley, her pillow was wet with tears before sleep came.

She woke during the night. Her mouth throbbed. Is it words or toothache?

Toothache starts and is stopped with violence masked or revealed.

—Smell the pretty towel, the dentist said to Grace, and obligingly she lifted her head, sniffing at the pretty pink towel; then choking with the deceit of it she struggled, bit, kicked, but it was no use, the dentist won, by telling lies he had won, and soon Grace was asleep, and when she woke the tooth was gone, there was a ragged hollow in her mouth and a taste of blood, the special taste that you know is blood and that makes you say, while you see it in your mind red, flowing down wide wide stone steps into the sun and the market-place,—It’s blood, I can taste blood. When the tooth was gone there was no more crying in the night and smacked bottom at night because she cried, there was only the new discomfort - Grace was getting too big for her cot, her legs went against the bars when she tried to stretch them. She was four now, and her favourite music was the bagpipe music played by their father as he walked up and down the passage in the evening.

—Play me to sleep, Dad. Bagpipe me to sleep. Quick, I’ll get into my cot and you bagpipe me to sleep!

And their father played them to sleep, mostly with the full bagpipes, squashing the bag rhythmically with his arm as he walked so that it made a faint wheezing sound, like Grandad under the music; other times without the bag and the pipes spread like fingers and the hanging tartan fringes, the kilt, the sporran, only in ordinary home-from-work clothes, standing still, playing the chanter; explaining, with a resignation that seemed frightening, there was not even the stir of a struggle in
it, that one day he’d never be able to play the bagpipes again, he’d only be able to manage the chanter, and then, gradually, not even the chanter.

—Some day, he said, I won’t have the wind.

How strange to pass from the brilliant paraphernalia of bagpipe and kilt to the shorn, drab chanter which never captured the full gurgle and skirl and wail of Highland glens and hills; and from the chanter to go, very quietly, almost not caring, to nothing; a valve of life closing, sealed for ever.

And it happened as Grace’s father had predicted. A time came when he no longer played the bagpipes and when the chanter lay disused in its box in the sideboard; the kilt went astray on one of the many ‘shifts’, and Grace and her sisters and brother played beards and Santa Claus with the sporran.

—Bagpipe me to sleep!

He sang to them, too.

‘Come for a trip in my airship,’ he sang.

And,

And the song which made the little sister, Dots, who was nearly three, run to hide under the table, sobbing and sobbing, while the others watched in pity for her; their hearts turned to ice when they heard the song but only little Dots was moved to tears. Supposing . . . supposing . . .

Oh why did their father torture them by singing it? He wasn’t a miner, he was a first-class engine-driver,
locomotive engineer
he described himself in his time-sheets and when there were papers from school to be filled in, saying what their father
did
; yet perhaps he was, after all, a miner? Everything was so
possible
. Possibility was not a bag or box that could be closed and sealed, it was a vast open chute which received everything, everything; one could not choose or direct or destroy the powerful flow of possibility.

—There’s no such word as
can’t
! their father would say to them sternly, and although they tried to understand, to reason the matter, they could only grasp that he spoke the truth; they learned, also, that there was no such word as
isn’t
or
wasn’t
. Apparently, everything
was
. Dragons? Even dragons. And God.

So their father was a first-class engine-driver, yet at the same time he was a miner going down the mine to his death because his little daughter, Dots, with the fair hair, had dreamed it all, had dreamed that he died.

When their mother sang to them at night she seldom sang unhappy songs; sometimes they were puzzled and confused by words which were meant to make them laugh, but they did not laugh, they frowned, saying Why? Why? How can it be? How can Grandma’s uncle die with the pip? Which pip?

Their mother disapproved of sad songs. She reproached their father for making the children cry with fear when he sang
The Wearing of the Green
.

Hanging men and women! Their mother said,—Never mind, kiddies, don’t think about it, it’s only a song, think of fairies and angels and God in Heaven . . . But angels were beings so difficult to think about, their life seemed silly, they weren’t men or women, they didn’t eat, they didn’t go to the lavatory or speak, they merely flew around in the clouds or walked on earth in disguise . . . now that was more interesting . . . one never knew . . .

—Why did they hang men and women at the wearing of the Green?

—Don’t sing it, Curly.

—Sing
Ragtime Cowboy Joe
, Dad!

This was an action song; their father had to get up to dance to it. He was Ragtime Cowboy Joe.

—Now
Dan Murphy
, Dad.

That was their special song, because a Mr Murphy lived over the road, and his doorstep was a stone doorstep with green moss growing on it.

—’Twas long years ago . . . their father would begin, and, put into the right mood of sadness they would wait for him to sing the special part about
them
. He would look at them proudly; how noble they felt!

This last line was always sung in a warble which cracked at the end as it became louder; it was a pathetic loudness and boldness which stayed in Grace’s memory; she could still hear her father singing it, for it held one of those unidentifiable qualifications which so often admit to permanent memory the most commonplace unexpected events, words, snatches of sentence and song.

In spite of her objections to ‘sad’ songs their mother had a full verse repertoire of wars, floods, tidal waves. There was a dog which pined and died at his master’s grave - the refrain at the end of each verse went

‘The dog at his master’s grave . . .’

There were little crippled boys, orphaned girls; but their mother’s favourites were poems dealing with universal rather than personal disasters. Floods haunted her. Grace knew, by the way her mother spoke, that she had been there, in the Ark, with Noah and the animals; that she had been on the coast of Lincolnshire during the High Tide.

‘The old mayor climbed the belfry tower.’

(Grace saw the old mayor in his wide black hat, in his skinny stockinged legs with red garters, spidering his way up the narrow stairs.)

Then the cows coming home (like Betty, Beauty, Pansy) -

But Grace knew that although cows waited to be milked and Beauty and Pansy were docile they did not always obey the call to the milking-shed - the cow-byre; there was one cow, named Scrapers because she fastidiously scraped her hooves before entering the byre, who had to be led with a rope around her horns and whose progress, instead of being through a gentle meadow of daisies and primroses, was down a steep path beside limestone cliffs with a creek in the gully over which she had to be persuaded to jump. Yet Whitefoot, Lightfoot, Jetty, Beauty, Pansy, Scrapers, lived within sound of the sea and (Grace always supposed) in the threat of a tidal wave - it was Grace’s mother who made it so - did she not look fearfully from the window towards the Breakwater, Cape Wanbrow, the Pacific Ocean roaring so near, while she told them of Mary, of the Sands of Dee,