Kisses on a Postcard (13 page)

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away.

They fly forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.

Having listened he said casually, ‘That’s right, boy. Not bad. If we got to bother God this Sunday let’s bother him with a decent bit of sense, eh? Not all that slop about living eternally in heaven with Him, eh? There’s nothing cosy about time bearing its sons away. Pretty agnostic, really, innit, for a hymn?’

‘What’s agnostic, Uncle Jack?’

‘It’s halfway to good sense, boy. Atheism says there’s no God; agnostic says I’m not sure. I don’t suppose the chap that wrote any hymn’s a real atheist, so we’ll have to do with halfway house. Now, let’s have it again but we’ll hit ’em with a bit o’ clever phrasing this time, so they listen. Look yere, take your breaths where I marked the page. See? Then they’ll have to think a minute. Not that any of ’em do in church, but you never know.’

‘There is only one God, isn’t there, Uncle Jack?’

‘At most.’

‘Then why are church and chapel different?’

I had got him on to one of his favourite rants. He leaned in confidentially. ‘Well, you see, boy, church is a lot of lying, hypocritical, God-bothering, sinful Tories.’ He paused, hoping I would ask the question. I did.

‘And what’s chapel?’

‘Chapel is church without the poetry.’ Having got that one off his chest he returned with vigour to the matter in hand. ‘Come on now, with sense this time. Breathe where I marked it and start off with a big ’un.’

I gave it to him as instructed, one breath for the first two lines. I could just make it. ‘“Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away.” ’ Big breath. ‘ “They fly forgotten,” ’ a quick breath, the remainder smoothly rolled out in one, ‘as a dream Dies at the opening day.” ’ I let the last word hang and fade as my breath ran out.

There was a moment before he spoke. ‘There is lovely, my Terry. There is a beautiful voice you do have there. Makes me cry to year you. A scruffy little cockney with a voice like an angel.’

But I was learning his language. ‘You don’t believe in angels.’

He grinned and made to cuff me. ‘Only when I hear them sing.’

I dared to be too intrusive in this cosy atmosphere. ‘Why don’t you believe in God, Uncle Jack?’

He leaned back and looked thoughtfully at me. ‘Perhaps I should turn that question round and ask you why you
do
believe.’

Like so many of his remarks this was too fundamental for an eight-year-old. I thought and stared at him, my head in a whirl. ‘Everybody does.’

‘Do they? I’m not so sure about your dad and mam.’

More things to grapple with that I hadn’t thought about.

‘You know, boy, I was a Christian once. Brought up into it like all of us. Then, when I was in the trenches in the last war – the one before this one, two before the next – we went forward through no-man’s-land one night and captured some German dugouts. They’d made them quite homely. Very tidy, except for the dead body on one of the bunks. D’you know what was written on the wall?’

Of course I didn’t as I tried to visualise this macabre domestic scene.

‘Three words. In German.
Gott mit uns
. D’you know what that means?’

I was no more prescient than a moment ago.

‘It means “God’s on our side.” ’ He smiled at me. ‘Well. And all the time I had thought he was on ours. There was silly of me. He was backing both sides. Or neither.’

Suddenly I was on firmer ground. I came in hotly, ‘Those Germans were wrong. He was on our side. We won that war.’

Uncle Jack was unperturbed, continuing to smile sadly at me. ‘You’re right. So we did. I forgot for a moment.’

‘And we’ll win this one too.’ I restrained myself from pointing an imaginary Bren gun at him and making the appropriate firing noises.

‘I’m sure you’re right, boy. Let’s hope so.’

‘Can I go out to play now? The soldiers are coming back from manoeuvres.’

‘Have you written to your mam and dad this week?’

‘I was going to.’

‘Mam and dad first.’ He winked at being able to get both the last word and the last joke in. ‘You don’t want them thinking we’re all heathens down yere in Cornwall, do you?’

On the mantelpiece over the range in the living room of
7
Railway Cottages sat the two little brass shells in their cases with their soldered-on badges of the Prince of Wales: the three feathers and
Ich dien
on a scroll beneath, part of the cap badge of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. These shells, standing some seven or eight inches high, were treasures to us. We were fascinated by them. I think they were live. I can remember handling them again and again, feeling their weight, their shape, their menace. They were from the First World War, we knew, something to do with Uncle Jack’s past. He would not tell us. At some point we had made some sort of deal with him about practising and the shells. One evening we sang ‘The Ash Grove’ in harmony for him and Auntie Rose. She was, as always, full of praise.

‘That’s lovely, boys,’ she said, glowing.

Uncle Jack was more cautious. ‘That’s right, both of you. Not bad. You sound as though you’re thinking what you’re singing as well as making a beautiful sound.’

Jack was in at once. ‘You going to tell us now, then, Uncle Jack?’

He looked shifty. ‘Oh, well, I’m not sure.’

‘You promised when we got “The Ash Grove” right,’ I chimed.

Auntie Rose was instantly alert. ‘Promised what?’

Uncle Jack squirmed more. ‘I didn’t say it was right. I said it’s not bad.’

‘He said he’d tell us the story of the Army badges on the two shells on the mantelpiece. And
Ich dien
,’ we clamoured.

She looked upset. ‘Oh Jack, what do they want to year all that old history for? Horrible war stories. Isn’t this one enough? Our Gwyn’s out there, you know.’

Uncle Jack was surprisingly mild. ‘They’re boys, Rose, not wurzels.’

Jack and I were already dancing round the room, firing guns and making boyish noises. ‘Rat-at-tat-tat. Boom. Crash. Gwyn’s a Desert Rat.’

Auntie Rose got to her feet. ‘To the chickens, me. Get the eggs. The hens do talk more sense than you.’

And we were left to hear the stories of the First World War, Uncle Jack’s war. ‘I was in the bantams’ battalion, see. If you was under five foot you weren’t accepted at first. Good enough to dig coal, too small to fight, they said. Then after our High Command had let the Germans slaughter most of the good men they needed more cannon fodder so they took us titches. We made a whole battalion: the Welsh Bantams. We was in the line up against the Prussian Guards, big fine fellers, all of ’em over six foot tall. How ’bout that?’

We were horrified: he knew how to tell a story.

‘Cor, that’s not fair.’

‘That’s terrible.’

He smiled, having caught us, an easy thing to do. ‘Oh, no. Not so silly. Every man’s the same height when a bullet hits him. He’s horizontal.’

‘That’s brilliant.’ His views of generals and others in charge were already well known to us. ‘Our High Command weren’t so stupid, Uncle Jack. They thought of that.’

He changed at once, growling angrily. ‘Don’t let me catch you saying any good of our leaders, boy. Especially that particular lot. They were just men like you will be sooner than you think. What were we doing fighting at all? Ernie Bevin tried to stop it with a general strike but they called him a traitor. Now, in this lot, he’s in the Govern—’

Politics had got him again and he needed to be rechannelled. ‘But the shells and the badges. What happened in the Great War?’

His response was sharp. ‘Great War, eh? Who taught you that?’

‘It’s on the war memorial in the village.’

‘Huh. Great.’ He went into himself for a moment. ‘Great, indeed.’ He remembered us and gathered himself again for the story. ‘First we was up against the Saxons. They was all right. They didn’t like the war no more ’n we did. We used to put up a tin helmet on the end of a rifle for their snipers to take potshots at. Then they did the same for us and we scored points. The officers stopped that. Said it was giving them practice. Practice? Huh. Nobody needed it.’

‘But what does “
Ich dien
’’ mean?’

‘It’s Welsh for “I serve”. The Prince of Wales’s feather and his motto. It’s funny, “
ich
’’ is like German. It’s more German than English. But we’re Celts, dark and small, different from you Anglo-Saxons, fair-haired like them buggers.’

‘Are Jack and me Saxons?’

‘Were the Prussian Guards fair, too?’

‘Some of ’em, yes. A thousand of them were in this wood near the Somme. There was a thousand of us, too. Our artillery started shelling them. Their artillery started shelling us. Everyone got blown to bits. Who killed who? I don’t know. Bloody fools. Trees like used matchsticks stuck in the mud. Then it got cold. German and Welsh dead frozen together, bayonets in each other. Next morning the frost had made them all white; it didn’t look real, like some hellish wedding cake. “Those whom death hath joined together let no man put asunder.” Seventeen of us came out alive. We got one of those insignia each.’

‘But you’ve got two.’

‘One is my mate’s, Ifor Davies. Faceman from Ystrad, even smaller ’n me.’

‘But if Ifor Davies was one of the seventeen why didn’t he keep his badge?’

‘There were plenty more battles, boy.’

It took a moment to realise the meaning that his chilling answer led us to.

‘You were lucky, weren’t you, Uncle Jack?’ Jack said.

He looked thoughtfully at us, his mind far away. ‘That’s right. Lucky. Survival is an accident, boy. Chance. We learned that in the trenches but it applies to everything. It’s not destiny; it’s not bravery, nor cowardice; it’s not God paying you back because you’re good or bad; it’s not even survival of the fittest. It’s an accident.’

‘But you lived through it. I bet you were clever and kept your head down,’ I said, clinging to some certainty or other in this bleak assessment of the world by our diminutive soldier philosopher.

Uncle Jack allowed no get-outs. His voice rose with a bitter nasal tang. ‘No one was clever, boy. The clever ones weren’t there at all. No matter what happens to you in your life, just remember this: there’s no justice. There never was and there never will be. But you’ve got to pretend there is. We call that being civilised.’ He looked at our dismayed faces and perhaps relented a little. Anyway, he could never resist a final twist to anything he said, and though his expression remained serious, he paused, betraying his lighter intent. ‘Just remember two things: it’s not fair . . . and don’t be late. Live your life like that and that’s all you can do.’

I turned the massacre in the woods over and over in my mind. I acted out the scene in our woods below Doublebois, creeping through the undergrowth down by the river. I hid behind trunks as shells ripped through the foliage, tearing the boughs off; splintering the green wood, uprooting forest giants, converting trees and men to blackened stumps. Why did the thousand of our men go in here? And why did the Germans? Who wanted to capture a wood anyway? All those little Welshmen hugging the ground, getting blown to pieces in spite of their lack of inches. The event had horror, fascination and mystery, which I could leave only briefly behind as I emerged into the Rabbit Field, one of seventeen survivors going home to tea and the polished mementoes on the mantelpiece.

Uncle Jack, when pressed by us, had other stories. ‘It was raining. Raining. Raining. The soaking summer of
1916
. Everything was sodden. Your boots rotted on your feet. Mud, there was mud everywhere; chest-deep sometimes. Men disappeared in it.’

I held my breath. ‘What do you mean? Disappeared?’

‘Vanished. Got swallowed up.’

‘But . . . but . . . couldn’t you . . .? They can’t just . . .
go
.’

‘Oh, couldn’t they? You had to make sure you didn’t follow them. Stay on the boards.’