Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) (16 page)

I can’t wait to try the jam tarts that you are making. We have lots of jam tarts here but they are not as good as those that your Mam makes.

I’m sorry but I don’t think that they would let us come home just yet. The men who are marching up Trafford Road are asking the dock owners to give them a fair day’s pay. It is very difficult for some of them because they are keeping a few families going whilst the men are away and I think that I would be on their side.

The weather here is very hot at the moment and there are lots of beautiful flowers. In the morning we see big families of rabbits like your Floppy getting their breakfasts before it gets too hot. After that we get masses of horrible flies. They even come into your cup when you are having a drink of tea.

Darling, try to be a bit extra kind to Edith Hardcastle because her Dad has had an accident here and he won’t be coming home again. Don’t say anything about it unless she says something to you but, if she does, tell her that he was very brave and that we all said a prayer for him.

I am very pleased that you are doing well at school, Laura, because it is very important for you as you get older. I’m sure that your Mam knows what is right for you with the times tables so keep practising them and we will be very proud of our little girl.

Love

Dad

PS. Yes, ps’s are very useful.

PPS. I have sent a letter to your Mam with this one but will you tell the others that I will send letters to them next week because the boat is leaving soon
.

Chapter 8

Christmas 1915

The battle, in August, for small areas of Turkish soil around Krithia vineyard had continued for some days but there were no further gains by the Allied troops. The lives of thousands of soldiers had been sacrificed but the operation was a failure because of what seemed, for the soldiers in the trenches, to be the mesmerizing incompetence of those who were directing it. The Allied landings at Suvla Bay had been achieved with virtually no enemy resistance but the landing parties, instead of sweeping across and round to the rear of the Turks, encamped in the bay and did nothing.

Elsewhere, a combined force of four hundred from the Ghurkhas and the 6th South Lancashires had stormed the cliffs at Chunuk Bair and had driven the Turks before them. They had raced down the slopes after the fleeing Turkish soldiers, intent on achieving the major strategic gains of Maidos and the control of The Narrows in the straits. Suddenly, and with deadly accuracy, they had been hit by a salvo of heavy artillery fire and the band of heroes had been wiped out. The shells that had destroyed them had been British.

Since August, although the skirmishing had continued, there had been no major battles and both sides had entrenched in the positions that they held. Many of the sick and injured, along with new reinforcements, had joined them from Alexandria and life for the Salford soldiers had settled into a desultory routine.

They had spent four months in the line and in reserve in a variety of trenches around Gully Ravine. The landscape had taken on a new kind of beauty where the once green, but now straw coloured, grass was slashed and torn by the scars of the artillery shelling. The sometimes ethereal and tranquil appearance of the no-man’s-land, however, had belied its deadly secrets. The whole of the area was littered with the unburied corpses of soldiers from both sides, the air was heavy with the stench of rotting flesh, and disease had become the new enemy.

The flies were like a plague. They got everywhere, and, no matter how many were killed, there were millions more to replace them. The British soldiers tried to cover their food and drink but the flies were creative and persistent and they quickly spread diseases around their luckless victims. ‘Bloody big families these flies have,’ a miserable Liam had observed, ‘You kill one of the little sods and five thousand come to the funeral.’

The wells were drying up or becoming contaminated and access to clean water became a major problem. Special desalination vessels were brought in but many men were apprehensive about drinking the water in which they had seen the bloated carcases of dead horses floating alongside the bodies of their fallen comrades.

Edward and Liam and their Salford mates had had their share of the jaundice and the epidemic of septic sores that had been so widespread, but it was the debilitating dysentery that had wreaked the most havoc. The disease, fuelled by the irrepressible flies that swarmed over the unburied corpses, had spread throughout the soldiers in Gallipoli without deference to rank or age.

Edward had watched pitifully weak men, stripped of their dignity and their soiled clothes, and mortified by their failing bodies, crawling on their hands and knees to the plank of the latrine. Some had been so ill that they had slipped off into the slimy filth of the ditch and, without the strength to lift their bodies, had drowned in the fetid excrement.

Many men had died from disease during this period and many others had been taken off to recovery units, but the options for natural clean drinking water were virtually non-existent.

In October, after a prolonged spell of hot, dry weather, there had been some frightening rain storms that had caused widespread damage. Tents had collapsed, blankets had become sodden and the trenches, acting like drainage channels, had become running streams. The Salford lads were, however, quick to turn adversity into an advantage. They collected every empty vessel that they could find and set them up to collect the rainwater. They pleated the tops of semi collapsed tents so that the water ran, as if from a spout, into empty petrol cans and they arranged spare capes to funnel it into waiting cooking vessels. For a while, the drinking water crisis had been averted and the men enjoyed a more frequent supply of tea, albeit slightly petrol flavoured. Liam promoted it as ‘Ben’s Ole Juice.’

The weather had improved slightly, for a while, but then in November it had changed again. From the 15th to the 17th there had been a violent storm that had driven the sea up the beach submerging the bivouacs that were set up there. The heavy downpours of rain had raised the level of water in the gullies and dead mules, bales of hay and huge amounts of debris had been scoured out of the ravines and then washed out to sea.

The soldiers barely had time to recover before being hit by an even more violent storm on the 26th November. In parts of the Peninsula the waist-deep water had poured like a mill race down the trenches taking with it rations and equipment and, sometimes, even men. To escape the water the soldiers had stood on top of the trenches where they were in full view of the Turkish snipers. A quick glance at the enemy lines, however, had shown that they were themselves trying to escape the devastating effects of the weather. An unspoken truce had been established between the two sides as both struggled to survive against this new, common enemy.

The gales had turned into hurricanes and, on the beaches, piers and landing stages had been swept away. The flashing lightning and rolling thunder had turned the Helles Peninsula into a theatre of war where nature was demonstrating her own awesome powers to the human bit players. The heavy deluges, combined with freezing cold, had made conditions for the soldiers almost unbearable for two days then nature had delivered her coup de grace. On the 27th November the winds had changed to northerlies and the ice cold air had caused a fearsome blizzard. The Allied troops, with their sodden clothes freezing to their bodies, had struggled to find enough dry wood to light the fires that they needed for warmth and for cooking food. When the blizzard had stopped, the soldiers had been confronted with a calm and hauntingly beautiful, snow covered landscape but, before their numbed minds and frozen bodies could respond to it, there had been a rapid and devastating thaw.

Within minutes the gullies had been filled with raging torrents and many soldiers had drowned or were frozen to death. Many men had lost limbs and some had lost their reason. The casualties on the British side had been 15,000 men killed or injured. This was 10% of their total force and it had probably been a similar number for the Turkish army. More than 10,000 sick men from the Allied forces had had to be taken off the Peninsula to receive treatment.

Action between the two opposing forces over the recent months had ground itself into local, and largely unsuccessful, skirmishes although there was rarely a break in the shelling and sniper fire.

The Salford lads had been invited, in October, to volunteer for mining duties which was, in some ways, a relief from manning the trenches and it gave them a useful pay increase. The strategy had been simple, if exhausting and dangerous. They had dug tunnels underground to a position underneath the enemy trenches and then laid a large charge of explosive before retiring to the safety of their own trenches. There they had exploded the charge and watched as the spectacular clouds of dust and debris plumed up into the air.

Unfortunately, the Turkish soldiers had been practising the same mining techniques against the British lines and both sides had employed listeners to try to determine what their opponents were doing. Sometimes the two sets of tunnels ran dangerously close together and, at the end of October, the Turks had exploded a mine in a British tunnel in which soldiers from the 5th Manchesters had been working. Edward and Liam had been involved in the rescue party, digging out tons of fallen earth, and they had eventually pulled out three men alive and two dead. Another three that were known to be part of the mining party had been given up for lost.

Three days later Liam had come bouncing down the trench and told them excitedly that he had just heard that the three missing men had just been brought from the shaft. Although they had had no food and only one bottle of water between them, one of the soldiers, a young Manchester lad called Grimes, had had a penknife and a lot of determination. Over three days they had dug their way through twelve feet of fallen earth, clawing at the debris and pulling away the large rocks. When they had finally broken through, on the point of collapse, two of them had had to be carried on stretchers from the mine shaft but the third – Private Grimes – had determinedly fought through his exhaustion and walked out.

The news had spread rapidly throughout the Allied forces around the Peninsula. They had seen many of their comrades die but to have three of them come back from the dead was like a small miracle for them.

In the middle of November they had received a visit from Lord Kitchener who had come to see for himself the situation on the Helles Peninsula. All the early misgivings that he had expressed, he now saw, had been borne out but there was no triumphalism as he inspected the desperate stalemate of the opposing sides. Instead, there was an enormous sadness as he saw the evidence of the catastrophic failure of the Gallipoli campaign and counted the cost that his soldiers had paid for so little gain. The strategic objective of sweeping up through Turkey and attacking the Germans from the south could, clearly, never be achieved. On his return to England the decision had been made to pull out of the Peninsula and orders were issued to the local command.

***

29 Myrtle Street

Cross Lane

Salford 5

Great Britain   

15th November 1915

Dear Dad,

I knew already about Edith Hardcastle’s Dad because her mother was running round the street one day and she was screaming and crying. Then she was lying on the floor and banging on the flags with her hands. Mam said ‘Oh My God. She’s had the telegram.’ Mam and some of the other women went over and picked her up and brought her back to our house for a cup of tea. Mam gave her one of your cigarettes out of the sideboard but she coughed a lot because she didn’t smoke so Mrs Potter smoked it for her. Mam told me to go and call for Edith but she had gone to her Aunty Lily’s so I took our Mary down the street on our Edward’s bogey instead.

Edith told me that her Dad is dead now but he was a hero and he will get lots of medals. But I think that she’d rather have her Dad because he was teaching her to play the piano and she doesn’t know what she will do now. She broke her glasses at school yesterday so that’s another problem for her.

I am working hard at school and the best lesson is when we all get dictionaries and it’s who finds the words first and I usually win. And this week I have written three letters for girls at school to send to their Dads because they are not very good at them. One of them was Trudie Thompson who pulled my hair really hard when it was my birthday so I made some spelling mistakes on purpose.

Do you remember when you used to take us down to Ordsall Park and past where that big pond was? Well the teacher told us in the history lesson that there is a big old hall that is supposed to be haunted and that is where Guy Fawkes went to make the plan to blow up the King in London. She said that it is a bit of a mess now but children shouldn’t go on their own because there is the ghost of a lady in white that wanders round at night and gets any kids that climb over the wall. Will you take us, Dad, when you come home because I don’t think that she will grab a soldier?

We are having a Christmas fair at the Mission next week and I have made some jam tarts. Mam has made some toffee and our Edward brought some apples from the greengrocer’s where he works so that she could make some toffee apples as well. Mam said they were cookers and wouldn’t do so she made some pies instead.

Uncle Jim said that he will send you some rolls of fly paper over so then you can enjoy your cup of tea better.

I don’t know whether to put a note up the chimney for Father Christmas this year. Mam says that there won’t be many toys because there is a war on and all his helpers are in the army. Perhaps they are making things so that you can have a good Christmas in Turkey. Our Edward said that the man in his shop told him that there was no such thing as Father Christmas. That’s probably because he never gets any presents anyway because his nose is always dripping and he smells funny.