And the Land Lay Still (34 page)

It was the earlier talk about the hill in Korea that did it. That and the extra pint maybe. Halfway home, Don’s bladder suddenly couldn’t wait another five minutes. There were houses on one side of the road and a park on the other. ‘Just a minute, Jack,’ he said, and hurried across the tarmac and into the shadow of some trees. It was a calm, cloudless night. As he stood relieving himself he closed his eyes, breathing deep, and in a moment was in northern Italy. The same season of the year; the same cool smell coming off the hills.

There was a river, the Germans dug in on the far side. A couple of British infantry divisions supported by tanks were waiting to cross, but they couldn’t move till the German defences had been softened up. Don was further back in a column of lorries loaded with ammunition, stuck on the main approach road from the south. It wasn’t a comfortable place to be, out in the open with two tons of explosives at your back. He was sitting in the passenger seat, scanning the sky for planes. The driver was a guy from Glasgow, Brian Kelly. The engine throbbed then died as Kelly switched off. All down the line you heard the same noise.

‘What’s the fucking problem this time?’ Kelly said.

Don said, ‘Dinna ken, but as long as we’re here I’m away tae stretch my legs.’

He opened the door and dropped to the road, into the path of a young lieutenant marching up the line of vehicles. No more than a boy really. Don had maybe three or four years on him, but he didn’t think of himself as a boy any more.

‘You there,’ the boy said. ‘Want to make yourself useful? Come with me.’

Don thought about objecting.
Never volunteer for anything
was the golden rule, but he was bored so he followed the purposeful stride of the lieutenant. Half a dozen lorries further on, they stopped.

‘There’s a bicycle in the back of that,’ the boy said. ‘Fetch it down, would you?’

Don hauled himself up over the tailboard and made his second mistake in two minutes. ‘Which one dae ye want, sir?’ he said. ‘There’s two in here.’

‘Jolly good. Can you ride a bicycle?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Thinking, as the words came out, that he shouldn’t have let them.

‘Jolly good. Throw them both out.’

Don lifted the bikes in turn and lowered them as far as he could, then dropped them on their tyres.

‘What’s your name, private?’

‘Lennie, sir.’

‘Right, Private Lennie, follow me.’

Even then he might have said something about staying with his unit, but he didn’t. He got on the second bike. Maybe that was all the reason he needed: the prospect of a bicycle ride. The lieutenant began to weave his way through the jam, and Don followed.

‘Let’s find out what’s causing the hold-up!’ the boy shouted over his shoulder.

Don could have told him and saved them both the effort: Field-Marshal Kesselring and the 10th Army. The Germans were falling back to the mountains, their last line of defence before the Lombardy plain and Austria, but they kept stopping and putting up another fight. Pointless really. Everybody knew they were going to lose the war now. It was just a question of when, and how bloodily.

Somebody had at least had the sense to stop the bulk of the column before it was in view of the German positions, but as Don and the lieutenant came over a slight rise in the road they could see that four lorries had driven down towards the river. A belt of trees and scrub screened the British positions a little. The wreckage of a bridge lay in the water. Guns were going off on both sides, and there was occasional light-arms fire. Don could see tanks and field
guns manoeuvring into protected positions. There were troops on the ground too, keeping their heads down. He didn’t blame them.

‘Right, come on then,’ the boy lieutenant said, and he was off, freewheeling down the hill towards the group of lorries. What the hell are you going down there for, Don thought, we don’t need to go down there yet; but he pushed off after him anyway.

It was surprisingly quiet by the river. It felt safer than being stuck on the open road. The lorries were parked in a kind of paddock, protected on three sides by trees. The lieutenant flung his bicycle on the grass and marched over to another officer. They began to talk earnestly with one another. None of my business, Don thought as he dismounted, and at that moment he heard his name being called from beside the lorries.

He recognised several of the men, good lads, a Cockney, a couple of Geordies, a Cornishman called Paddy Harris. He knew all their faces. They had a brew of tea on, and offered him a mug. ‘We thought we’d take the chance while we could,’ Paddy said.

‘What are you carrying?’ Don asked, hoping it wasn’t ammunition.

‘Compo rations,’ Paddy said. ‘Sorry, no cucumber sandwiches.’

‘Compo rations? Up here?’

‘We got ahead of ourselves. Some stupid cunt waved us on and then we couldn’t stop or we’d have blocked the road completely. So here we are. Who’s that you’re with?’

‘Dinna ken,’ Don said. ‘Just a young lad wanting tae be in the thick of it.’

‘Well, what the fuck are
you
doing with him then?’

‘Good question,’ Don said. It felt like a dream. What
was
he doing there? He should have been back with Kelly and the rest of his unit.

The lieutenant came over. ‘Any more tea?’ he asked. And while somebody found him a mug he said, ‘Soon be moving. They’ve called up air support to knock the Krauts up a bit. Going to put up some smoke so the Americans know the target. Ah, there it goes.’

The twenty-five pounders further down the river fired off a salvo of smoke shells. Through gaps in the trees they could see a line of thick red smoke spreading along the opposite bank, marking the German positions.

The tea went straight through Don. He handed back the mug and headed off across the paddock, forty yards or so, and stood facing the
trees while he pissed. A breeze was coming off the river. He sniffed. Traces of red smoke drifted above him. He thought, that’s a bit close. As he was buttoning up he heard the planes coming over the hill.

The next thing he knew he was flat on his face, drowning in noise, being shaken like a bottle of sauce. The world seemed to be collapsing in on itself, splitting into chunks. Branches cracked and fell around him. The ground fountained up in the air and showered down again, mud rain. His mouth was pressed into mud and he was shouting, no words, just a repeated, formless roar. He wanted to get up and run somewhere – into the woods, into the river, back up the road. He fought down the urge. Stay where you are, stay flat. There were flashes and bangs going off all around him, shrapnel whizzing through the air, he could feel some of it whipping past his head. He flattened himself further. The stuff was missing him by inches. They were hitting the wrong side of the river, the stupid bastards, how could they possibly have thought the Germans were on the south bank? Another wave of explosions rolled through the air just above him. It was anti-personnel bombs they were dropping, with spikes that hit the ground first and detonated the bombs at chest height. Stay down, stay down. He thought he heard screams amid the incessant roar but couldn’t be sure if anybody other than himself was screaming. Something crashed beside him, a yard or two away, he didn’t dare look to see what it was. His eyes were screwed tight, his mouth full of earth and smoke. He was struggling to inhale, couldn’t go on much longer without a proper breath. Then suddenly, like a demented fairground ride crashing, the madness juddered to a halt.

He opened his eyes. A bicycle, a twisted mess of metal minus one wheel, lay next to him. He tried to work out if it was his or the lieutenant’s. Didn’t matter. Nobody would be riding it again.

He was standing in the trees at Wharryburn, finishing off his pee. He swayed with faintness. He was out in a sweat. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he said, putting himself away. He never swore like that. Over on the road, he heard Jack say, ‘You all right?’

‘Aye,’ he said, and started coughing violently. ‘Jesus,’ he said again, and cleared his throat and spat into the bushes. He stayed in the darkness a moment longer, to wipe his eyes, then staggered back to Jack standing in the moonlight.

‘I just had a kind o dream,’ he said. ‘A memory. Something frae the war. Just oot o naewhere.’

‘Aye,’ Jack said evenly.

‘Shook me up a bit,’ Don said, and told Jack about it.

How he got to his feet, tottering as he found his balance. The green paddock was gone. So – completely – were two of the lorries. The other two lay smouldering and smashed, like dead fairground horses. Much further away he could hear men cursing, shouts for help. There were tins and bits of wooden crate and food everywhere. Pudding, concentrated soup, chopped meat. He thought, where are the others? But then he saw that some of the debris was pieces of the men he’d been talking to a few minutes earlier. The lieutenant’s cap. Somebody’s foot and leg, still booted and trousered. Somebody’s hand. Blood everywhere. If you shovelled it all up you’d have approximately twenty men. The other bike. When he saw a blackened football rolled up against a lorry wheel and realised it was Paddy’s head he was sick.

Jack stood patiently in the road while Don let it all out. He didn’t try to interfere. The best he could do was what he did: stand and wait. Don was a mess. He found his handkerchief, blew his nose and wiped his eyes again. He said, ‘There were other times, but that was the worst. And the fact that it was the Yanks …’

‘It doesn’t help,’ Jack said.

‘I dinna ken tae this day how I came oot o that,’ Don said. ‘I was the only one, ye ken. Everybody else was deid, and I didna hae a scratch on me. How was that? How did I survive?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jack said, with such gravity and force that nothing else could be said by either of them.
I don’t know
. It went through Don like a knife. And then, for the only time in their friendship – you could call it that – Jack reached out and touched Don; rested a hand on his shoulder for a moment, then slipped it under his arm.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you home.’

Just once you came back, you didn’t plan it but one day you were close, and drawn closer by the familiarity of landmarks, road signs. You came to the town. You walked past an entrance to a place you recognised. Nobody was around to recognise you. You’d hardly have recognised yourself. You thought of your wife and daughter, and something tugged, you half-remembered what that life had been like. It was gone, over, but for a moment you wondered if some ruins of it might still exist that could be repaired or built on. But while you were still a few miles away from the village something else happened, a coldness came over you that you read as a warning, an urgent message to escape while you could. The impossibility of normality. Because you’d pulled yourself back once before and it had been a mistake. So you cut out of the town, head down, avoiding glances, the curiosity or pity or fear or distaste in some eyes. You were a tramp to them, that was what they saw and what you let them see, and you tramped east, through the mill towns, onwards to coal country. You escaped as you had before. And things fell into place again.

You’d escaped because.

Poor towns and villages gave you more than other, wealthier, places. The people in them saw how near their lives scraped to yours, how a piece of bread and cheese or a few pennies or a kind word might keep your life away from them. That was the difference: you wanted it, they didn’t. You were walking along a street of miners’ cottages and a lassie who might have been the same age as your own stood watching you go by, and you stared hard to see who was inside her, to see who she might become, and you didn’t see it, but then you were blind to the pattern, if there was one, so you stopped and made an offering to her from the pocket of stones, and she was afraid, so you placed it on the road for her and went on, and when you looked back from the end of the street she was gone, and so were you.

You’d escaped because.

You hadn’t planned to leave. Or you didn’t remember planning it, but at some deep level you must have, because when it happened, when you found yourself away, you found yourself equipped for not coming back. The
haversack, the spare socks, underwear, shirt, the knife, the boots in which you’d worked the garden till they felt like your feet, boots you could walk a continent in, or a country of many twists and turns. The heel of a loaf was all the food you took, you kept it in your pocket as an insurance, you wouldn’t eat it till you had some other food for later. Never be without something, however small, for later. And it need be only enough to keep hunger at bay, enough to give you strength to go till the next meal. And then there was the money. You must have been laying money aside, squirrelling it away in hidden places, the garden shed, behind the fuse box, in the loft. You must have done this because you knew the places, you saw your hands moving dusty jars and tins, pulling a note from here, from there, and yet you couldn’t remember putting the money away, only retrieving it. The money was for eking out, for learning how to do without money, because it wouldn’t last for ever. No money would ever last for ever.

You’d escaped because everybody else was hell-bent on wanting everything and you saw it wasn’t going to work. Didn’t matter what your politics were after all. Irrelevant. Didn’t matter whether you were free or independent or democratic or oppressed, everybody wanted everything and they couldn’t have it. It wasn’t the age of small nations as you’d thought, it was the age of money and waste and garbage and pollution and destruction and it was all going to get worse, you could see it coming and you couldn’t do it, you couldn’t keep your place in such a world, couldn’t support a wife in such a world, couldn’t bring up a child in such a world. It was time to go. It was time to abandon.

When you left there was some kind of journey in your head, though you didn’t know the shape of it. You didn’t go on the bus, you weren’t risking being seen and brought back, you weren’t trusting anybody else. You were going on a journey and if nobody knew you were going or where, if you didn’t know yourself, then nobody could betray you, and after that it would be between you and the land. And so you went up the hill, through the woods, on to the moors. North. That much you did know. You were going north. In time you would go in every other direction too as you followed coastlines and paths and tracks and sometimes as you followed no discernible route at all, east and west and south you’d go, but always, sooner or later, north again. North, always north.