Authors: Richard Madeley
But as well as his loneliness and the sense of crushing
rejection, he must have also felt thrust backwards in time. His parents were a modern, forward-looking couple, inheritors of a bright new century and with the confidence and verve to sail the Atlantic and put down new roots in the vibrant and rapidly expanding New World. Yet here he was, trapped in a rural backwater, to be brought up by three bucolic products of the Victorian Age–an age that had barely passed. When Granddad came to Kiln Farm the Queen had been dead for less than six years.
William, who by primogeniture was the unchallenged head of the household, believed in hard work and thrift, which translated into backbreaking labour and a sparsely furnished, spartan home environment. How Granddad must have yearned for the softer comforts of his old life in Stanley Road, the sound of his brothers’ and sisters’ laughter, and the touch of his mother’s hand. The double blow to his self-esteem of first being abandoned and then having to accept that he had, in effect, been bargained away, must have been devastating. Not that he let on to anyone what his state of mind was; not then, and barely at all later. In one of his rare descriptions of the situation he confided just two succinct words to me. He had been, he said in his usual quiet tones, ‘utterly miserable’.
He was not treated like a slave, or a servant. He was, after all, family, and his guardians would be answerable for his upbringing. But he had undoubtedly become something dangerously close to a chattel: a human being who had, effectively, been bought and paid for. But he was not dealt with especially harshly, by the standards of an age when children, it was generally agreed, should be seen and not heard.
His spinster aunt seems to have done her best to welcome, calm and befriend the child who had so suddenly and unexpectedly entered her life. Approaching middle age, Sarah Madeley had long ago given up hope of marriage and bearing children of her own, and now fate had delivered her a son, of sorts. Meanwhile the boy, instantaneously deprived of a mother’s love and attention, reached out with both hands for a substitute.
Was Sarah consulted about Henry and William’s arrangement? It seems unlikely. Even at this distance the whole thing has the authentic smack of a classic fait accompli. I doubt even the boy’s mother was informed until the last possible moment, judging by her reported reaction. But we must remember how different times were then. Women were second-class citizens. They were denied the vote. Men were even allowed to beat their wives if they believed correction was necessary.
As an unmarried sister, Sarah would have had very little leverage in the affairs of her brothers, and in any case, William was his own man with a ruthless streak. If that were not already clear, his actions in years to come would put the question beyond doubt.
Sarah, I am sure, had no choice but to accept the situation concerning Geoffrey, and tried to help him adjust to his new life. She had no experience of bringing up children and had to rely on memories of her own nineteenth-century childhood. But my grandfather probably gave her a few guidelines based on the things his mother used to do for him, before she vanished from his life. Back in the never-to-be-regained world of Stanley Road, Hannah had a tradition of making rice pudding
every Sunday. It was not long before Sarah was replicating the recipe, and remembering, too, to serve Geoffrey’s portion complete with its ‘Mary Jane’–the obscurely named skin of browned milk and sugar that always formed on the surface and which was his favourite part.
But neither of her brothers could replace Henry in Geoffrey’s affections.
Meanwhile, as 1907 turned into 1908, Granddad had no option but to make the best he could of the hand his father and uncle had dealt him. He went to the church school in Shawbury, where his superior city education swiftly elevated him to the top of the class. The headmaster was a Mr Caswell, whose wife also taught there, and their darkly pretty daughter Maudie was in Granddad’s class. They quickly became childhood sweethearts; Maudie was another feminine salve helping to heal Granddad’s bruised heart and was probably a sister-substitute, albeit one with romantic overtones. And friendships with other boys must have gone some way to easing the burden of his loneliness.
But the greatest soothing influence, then and for the rest of his life, was music. Geoffrey had begun piano lessons in Worcester when he was six and was allowed to continue them in Shawbury. By the age of twelve he was accomplished enough to be invited to play church organ in the neighbouring hamlet of Morton Mill.
Music became my grandfather’s lifeline, his salvation. When he was playing, or attending the regular classical recitals that were one of the mainstays of rural entertainment in those pre-broadcasting days, he was transported from Kiln
Farm and the dull heartache that never seemed to leave him. Long before the age of counselling and therapy, my grandfather took reassurance and comfort from Handel, Beethoven, Chopin and Strauss. And as we shall see, great music would provide the language–the only language–through which he would be able to communicate emotionally with his youngest son. My father.
Slowly the seasons turned, and what remained of my grandfather’s childhood gradually unwound with them. Occasionally a letter would arrive from Ontario, where Henry and Hannah had settled with their six remaining children. Geoffrey must have replied to these missives but nothing survives of the correspondence. I wonder in what terms the exchanges were made? It is certain that Hannah was still desperately missing her lost boy, but what did she write of the reasons for leaving him behind? Did she apologise? Did she ask for forgiveness and understanding?
For his part he lived and breathed for the day, still long distant, when he could follow his family across the Atlantic. If my grandfather harboured any bitterness about his abandonment he never expressed it to a soul; not then, not ever. He steadfastly refused to allow resentment or anger to stand in the way of his ultimate goal–to get back to the way things had been. Expressing his anger, anguish and bitter disappointment would not help matters.
But it could not have been easy. My grandfather was
probably the most deliberately non-judgemental man I ever knew.
Meanwhile, he was growing up. He left Shawbury school and was sent to a private school in the nearby village of Astley. William paid the fees–four pounds and ten shillings a term–but not for long. A year later Granddad was deemed to be adequately educated and, more importantly, finally strong enough to begin working full-time on the farm. He was now fourteen years old.
Did William pay him? Up to a point. Of course he was ‘all found’ with his bed and board, and he told my mother that William allowed him one shilling a week. As Sunday was a day of rest–as far as it could be on a working farm–my grandfather was effectively earning tuppence a day; less than three pounds a year. But the money was of vital importance to him. He immediately began saving. With an iron will, he denied himself whatever small pleasures such a tiny wage might afford him, and hoarded virtually every penny away. He had a picture, which burned bright and sharp in his mind, of a day seven years in his future. He could see it clearly: the heart-stopping moment when he would walk into a Liverpool shipping office and, with his own money, buy himself a ticket. His passage to Canada.
By the time Granddad left school, Kiln Farm had seen its herd of dairy cows swell to a modest seven heads. Butter and milk were sold at the door. Mixed crops were grown and, gradually, almost unconsciously, the teenager settled into the timeless rhythm of the seasons. He discovered, slightly to his surprise, that he was–unlike his father–rather good at farming. In fact,
he began to suspect that he might have something of a flair for it. He had his own private ideas on how to increase yield and productivity, although he had to be careful how he suggested them. William was a proud and prickly character who kept his thoughts to himself and preferred others to do likewise.
He was also good with figures. Arithmetic and maths had been his strong subjects at school and now he was developing a head for business. Perhaps when he eventually got to Canada he would, after all, have something to show for all his lonely years, a set of skills that would be valued there. How proud his mother and father would be of him.
Each spring, the adolescent boy would tick off another birthday on his private, inner calendar. By the time he reached sixteen, on 8 April 1913, his goal at last seemed to be, if not within reach, at least within sight. Five more years before he would be twenty-one and free of his father’s and William’s ‘arrangement’; free to rejoin his family abroad. What a year that was going to be! It would be the happiest, he was certain, of his whole life, the point where everything would come gloriously right at last. The date seemed to glow in warm, golden numerals whenever he thought of it.
Nineteen eighteen. The final, apocalyptic year of the Great War.
L
ike most young men in 1914, my grandfather thought the outbreak of war with Germany was rather exciting. This scrap with the Kaiser had been a long time coming and it was time to get it over with. The Royal Navy and British Army were second to none. Our battleships, and an array of crack regiments battle-hardened by the wars of Empire, would swiftly carry the day. Everyone said so. The whole thing would be over by Christmas, and then things could get back to normal.
Rarely in British history has the national mood been so catastrophically at odds with impending reality. The delusion that the coming conflict would be swift, decisive and glorious pervaded every level of society. Young men–and not-so-young men–were falling over themselves to enlist, if necessary lying about their ages and medical conditions in order to fight for King and Country.
Enthusiasm to put on a uniform and pick up a gun ran
through all the social classes. The influential and well-connected writer, Rudyard Kipling, pulled every string possible to have the son he adored, Jack, accepted for military service. Jack repeatedly failed army medicals because of chronic shortsightedness, but his father would not have his son denied the chance for glory and finally succeeded in wangling a commission for him.
Jack Kipling was killed as soon as he arrived in France. It was a pitiful death. Lost and stumbling somewhere in the mud and smoke of the trenches during an assault, he simply disappeared–he was virtually blind without his thick spectacles–and Rudyard was plunged into guilt and remorse that remained with him for the rest of his life.
The causes of the Great War are argued over to the present day, but it was fundamentally about empire. As a sea-going nation Britain was deeply unsettled by the rapidly growing German Navy, and this rivalry on the high seas was the engine that helped drive the world into madness. Tensions in Europe were so high by the summer of 1914 that it only took a single shot to ignite them into open war. On 28 June a Bosnian Serb assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. There was immediate retaliation against Serbia and one by one a long chain of intricate alliances was activated. Declarations of war were tossed around like confetti and within weeks most European countries were at each other’s throats.
Hardly anyone really understood what had just happened but the British cheered enthusiastically anyway when war broke out. At least this was a chance to show the Germans who was boss. Jingoism was nothing to be ashamed of in 1914 Britain.
Life at Shawbury was largely unaffected at first. Geoffrey was seventeen now, and reckoned the whole shooting match would be over long before he got a sniff of the action. He continued to quietly put his shillings aside, and had no doubt that 1918 would see him departing, on schedule, to Quebec.
But disquieting rumours of unexpected setbacks on what had become known as the Western Front began to filter back. Newspapers–more people in Shawbury seemed to be reading them these days–persisted with their jingoistic, upbeat tone, but word of mouth was spreading as the first wounded began to straggle home. There were mutters that the British and French armies were stalled along hundreds of miles of snaking trenches and dugouts. Huge offensives to break the deadlock were being cut to pieces by machine guns and colossal artillery barrages.
The word ‘carnage’ began to be whispered. It was becoming clear the only soldiers for whom this war would be over by Christmas were dead ones.
One morning, long after the harvest and as the winter wheat was being sown, a neighbour called at Kiln Farm, clutching a copy of
The Times
. The man was shaking his head in disbelief as he pointed to a seemingly endless list of British dead and missing. ‘It was so long my uncles said it was obviously a mistake,’ Granddad recalled. ‘It must be a list of the wounded, not those killed in action, and the paper should be ashamed of all the unnecessary grief and suffering it had caused.’
There was no mistake. As 1914 dissolved darkly into 1915, Geoffrey Madeley began to realise, for the second time in his
life, that events beyond his control were again shaping his destiny. But this time he would meet fate on his own terms.
One fine morning he put on his best suit, walked into Shrewsbury, and enlisted.
His first military shock was an entirely pleasant one. The King’s shilling was payable on a daily basis, unlike William’s weekly offering, and overnight Geoffrey saw his income increase sevenfold. If he came out of this war alive, he would at least be able to afford something better than steerage class to Canada. He had long been familiar with the principal shipping lines’ transatlantic arrangements.
Eighteen-year-old Private Madeley spent his first night in the army at Shrewsbury Barracks, and two days later got his marching orders. Far from being packed off ‘tout suite’ to the slaughterhouse across the Channel, he was posted in the opposite direction, to northeast England. Cavalry was still considered to be a battlefield option and that gave my grandfather, with his experience of horses on the farm, an intermission between the harshness of his life so far and the horrors that would shortly follow.
Sixty-odd years later, when I was working as a television reporter, I filmed a story at beautiful Druridge Bay in County Durham. I mentioned it to Granddad. ‘Isn’t that near where you were stationed for a while during the First War?’
I can still see the look of delight that spread like sunlight across his face. ‘I learned my horsemanship on those sands!’
He told me of golden hours galloping along the seven-mile beach. Service life seemed like a paid holiday. And for the first time he had the companionship and friendship of comrades. Life in the army had bonded them all tightly together. Those boys who reminded him of Douglas and John were not blood brothers, but a band of brothers nonetheless. Suddenly, life wasn’t so bad.
It couldn’t last. Cavalry training was abandoned when the British and Germans realised horses weren’t much use against machine guns. Granddad found himself back on a troop train, this time taking him to the trenches. Stalemate on the Western Front persisted, as did the massacres. The facile optimism of three years before had evaporated and reinforcements like my grandfather knew they were headed for the most efficient killing fields the world had ever known.
His train pulled in to Crewe Station for its last stop before the embarkation points. As coal and water were taken on by the locomotive crew, men wrote final letters home to be posted at the docks; others smoked cigarettes or pipes and made attempts at gallows humour. My grandfather stared out of the window at another train that had halted at the station.
It was crammed with troops also bound for France. But there was something different about these soldiers, or at least their uniforms. Granddad suddenly realised they were Canadians, sent to help the mother country in her hour of need. He knew from a recent letter from his mother that his two older brothers had joined up back in Toronto. Could they be on board? The chances were hugely stacked against it, but still…
Granddad found himself shouldering his way through the packed carriage to the officers’ compartment.
‘Permission to speak, sir.’
‘Carry on.’
‘That train across there, sir…it’s full of Canadians.’
‘What of it?’
‘My brothers, sir…they’re serving in a Canadian division. I haven’t seen them for–in a very long time indeed. I’d like to cut across and see if they’re on board.’
The officers must surely have thought this boy was on a wild-goose chase but permission was granted anyway. Perhaps odds were called and bets made on whether he’d find either man.
Meanwhile my grandfather had doubled over to the other platform. He took a deep breath and climbed on to the Canadian train.
It was even more crowded than his own and he only had a few minutes. He began pushing down the carriages, calling their names.
‘Is there a Douglas or a John Madeley on board? Does anyone know a Douglas Madeley or a John Madeley…’
When I went to see the Spielberg movie,
Saving Private Ryan
, I shivered at the scene where Tom Hanks pushes his way through an endless column of soldiers, calling out for a Private Ryan. I suddenly saw my grandfather as a young man forcing his way down a packed troop train in an earlier war, shouting out his brothers’ names to disinterested and preoccupied soldiers.
Still he pressed on, refusing to give up hope.
He found Douglas and John sitting together in the same carriage.
I don’t know how he would have recognised them. Perhaps he had been sent a recent photograph; perhaps their faces were still discernibly those of the boys who had slipped away from him in the night so many years before. Perhaps another soldier simply pointed them out.
But it was an electrifying encounter. Geoffrey was looking into the eyes of his dear brothers, faces he had not seen for ten long and lonely years. They stared back, dumbfounded, at their lost brother, who they remembered as a little boy and who was now a strapping young man of twenty in uniform. An incredible coincidence had reunited them as they were all poised to plunge into the whitest heat of war.
It must have seemed like a miracle.
Perhaps it was.
The Madeley brothers knew the chances all three would emerge unscathed from France were slim. But they would have made no mention of that. Their hurried, snatched conversation (how strange Douglas and John’s Canadian accents must have sounded to Geoffrey!) ended with promises to write and, God willing, perhaps meet in France. Then my grandfather had to go. His train was leaving, and he walked back to it in a daze.
A reunion in such extraordinary, unlooked-for circumstances is unthinkable in today’s world where we can all track each other’s movements through multiple lines of communication–mobile phones, emails, Facebook. But ninety-odd years ago, in the wartime bustle of a railway station in the Midlands,
my grandfather found his brothers thanks to a sudden dart of almost animal instinct that had whispered to him they were close at hand. I have never believed it was simply an incredible coincidence; I think he felt their presence, somehow picked up a metaphysical signal and followed it to its source.
He never saw Douglas again. The eldest Madeley boy went into action a few weeks later in the Canadian Corp’s assault on Vimy Ridge. This pimple of land in the Nord Pas de Calais region was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Douglas was killed on the first day. John also took part in the battle, but survived.
Douglas Madeley lies somewhere near Vimy Ridge. His name is carved on the Canadian war memorial there. It is all that is left of him.
My grandfather was a typical veteran of the Great War in that he rarely spoke about what it was like to be at the centre of the bloodiest conflict in history. Like the huge majority of men who survived the carnage, he came home and refused to talk about it. But much later, in old age, one or two stories slipped out.
One recalled a ferocious German assault barely held off by his trench, the attackers surging so close to his position that he could see every detail of their faces as they fell to his platoon’s frantic rifle-fire. Afterwards, my grandfather stared in disbelief at the shreds of skin smoking and peeling from his right hand; the bolt of his Lee–Enfield .303 had become almost
red-hot during the intense firing. He couldn’t understand why the mechanism hadn’t jammed.
Then there was the sight of a comrade, one arm cleanly shot off by a burst of machine-gun fire, running in tight circles, screaming, before collapsing in death.
One especially vivid glimpse into hell took place on a warm summer’s afternoon when Granddad was sent with a message to the field hospital. When he got there he heard peculiar growling noises coming from behind a tent. Curious, he went to see what it was.
Four or five men were suspended, upside down, from meat hooks clipped to a metal A-frame. They were in the last stages of lockjaw–tetanus–and as their spines arched in the agonising death throes, medics thought some small relief could be found by inverting them.
Within days of arriving at the British trenches near Rouen, Granddad, like everyone else, was lousy. When the parasites weren’t dining on their host, they would hide in the seams of the men’s uniforms. The soldiers who’d been out there for a while showed the boy from Shropshire how to de-louse clothing, passing the flame of a candle smoothly along the stitching, paying special attention to the backs of collars. On cold nights nobody wanted to take off their tunic, and the men would help each other burn lice off the backs of their uniforms.
When I was about fifteen I once asked my grandfather if, as a young man barely twenty, he had been afraid of dying. Actually, I didn’t. By then I had learned that direct questions about his experiences in the trenches never got a reply; one
had to pose them as more thoughtful musings. I said something like: ‘I expect a lot of you–especially the younger ones–would have been very shocked and afraid. One minute you were safe in England, the next you were in the lines, fighting for your lives.’
After the long pause that always followed such not-so-subtle attempts to get him to describe his experiences, he answered: ‘Well, you see…we didn’t really talk about all that. No point. I think there was a silly song at the time, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” Something like that. Everyone was in the same boat and you just had to get on with things and do your best…knowing it was the same for everyone was a sort of help.’
And beyond this handful of stories and comments, my grandfather’s war withdraws itself into a privacy. Except for this postscript. After he had told me about the men dying of tetanus, I asked another question–one too many, I think, although there was no reproach in my grandfather’s eyes as he looked steadily into mine. I can clearly remember the scene: we were standing in a glade in an autumnal Epping Forest, foraging for sweet chestnuts. Finally he spoke. ‘Believe me, Richard…that was nothing like the worst of it.’
God knows what appalling secrets my grandfather–and millions like him–kept locked inside their heads. Some literally went mad, others withdrew into an interior world for the rest of their lives. Granddad probably saw himself as a survivor. He had managed to absorb the crushing fate of being abandoned as a child, and had long ago determined his own strategy to reverse it, a strategy fully in place as he prepared
to head home after the armistice in late 1918, more or less in one piece. He had lost part of one foot, from a machine-gun burst, and would be permanently deaf in one ear after a shell landed close to his trench. Both wounds were more or less hidden disabilities: his one good ear allowed him to continue to appreciate music, although years later the arrival of stereo hi-fi would be of little interest to him; the damage to his foot was mitigated by careful scissorwork to his shoes, home-made incisions in the leather that eased the pressure on his scars. He managed to walk without a limp.