The Evening Chorus (4 page)

“What do you think of the Kommandant?” he asks. “You know, as a person.”

“Well, I don’t really think of him as a person,” says Harry. He pauses. “I don’t
want
to think of him as a person, I suppose. He’s a Jerry. The guards are Goons. After the war, I won’t give any of them another thought. After the war, when I’m eating a slice of that delicious chocolate cake.” He is persistent, if nothing else, but James ignores his invitation.

“What do you think you’ll do after the war?” asks James.

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Harry irritably. He picks up his book where it lies open on his chest. “Perhaps”—he brightens—“I’m reading so many novels that I might try my hand at one. How hard can it be?”

T
HAT NIGHT
there is a debate in the bunkhouse, in the room at the end of the building. A debating society is one of the many diversions created by the prisoners of war to pass the time.

“Are you coming?” asks James at eight o’clock, after supper and evening roll call.

Harry lowers his novel to his chest. “What is the topic tonight?” he asks.

“Town life versus country life.”

Harry yawns, and then stretches his arms overhead. “That doesn’t interest me enough,” he says. “You go on.”

“But you haven’t been to one yet,” says James.

“Well, have I missed anything?”

James doesn’t quite know how to answer, as it’s true that none of the debates so far have been particularly riveting.

“Exactly,” says Harry, and he picks up his novel and goes back to reading.

Because the captured officers are not required to work, there is a long stretch of day to fill between roll calls, and some of the entertainments devised to stave off boredom are not always wildly successful. James hasn’t made his mind up about the debating society, but he has decided that if tonight’s debate isn’t lively enough, he won’t return for next week’s discussion on amateurs versus professionals.

The room where the debate is to take place is overcrowded; people spill out into the hallway. James leans up against the doorframe to watch.

There are three men on each team. The structure of the event is for each of the men to give an introductory statement and then for the debate to begin after that. But the crowded room isn’t conducive to listening, and the audience jostles and calls out during the opening remarks. What was meant to be an invigorating discussion on culture versus nature degenerates into name-calling and laughter.

“That was quick,” says Harry, when James comes back to their room. “You’ve only been gone about twenty minutes.”

“It was rubbish. No one would follow the rules.”

“Perhaps everyone is just a little tired of rules.”

“Perhaps.” James climbs up onto his bunk and lies on his back with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. The room is empty except for Harry and him. Everyone is down the hall.

“You’re on the side of country life, aren’t you?” says Harry.

“Yes.”

“And you would never be convinced to live in a town?”

“No.”

“Then you’ve missed nothing.”

“I’m sure there’s more to it than that,” says James. He listens to Harry turning a page of his novel, the sound, in the quiet of the room, vaguely reminiscent of wind in the tops of trees. “There would be a lot of arguing back and forth. Point and counterpoint.”

“But you would never allow your mind to be changed,” says Harry. “So there is no reason to listen to the arguments.”

James agrees, but he doesn’t say so out loud.

Harry seems to have heard anyway. “We’re a debating society of two, James,” he says. “And I’ve just won that one.”

T
HE NEXT
morning, James is sharpening pencils with Harry’s pocketknife at the table in their bunkhouse. He likes to have at least two spare pencils with him when he is at his post by the river, in case his working pencil breaks or wears down to wood. He carefully scrapes the body of the pencil, pushing the shavings into a small pile to give to Davis later. Davis likes to use them as roof tiles for the houses in his miniature village.

There’s shouting out in the yard. German voices and then English voices yelling back.

James climbs the ladder of his bunk so he can look out the window.

“What is it?” says Harry from his own bunk.

A man is being dragged by two of the German guards across the compound towards an automobile at the camp gate. James can see smoke pluming out the exhaust of the waiting car. The engine is running. A small crowd of prisoners is following the guards and the captive.

“They’re taking someone,” James says.

“Who?”

“I can’t tell from here.”

James watches as the prisoner is shoved into the back seat of the motor car. One of the guards gets in after him. Then the Kommandant, who must have been standing on his porch, watching the whole procedure, steps down and climbs into the front seat of the car.

“Maybe he’s being moved to a different camp,” says James.

Harry snorts. “Don’t tell me you believe that lie they’re always telling us.”

James does believe it, but it’s clear from Harry’s reaction that he shouldn’t, so he says nothing.

The camp gate opens and the motor car drives slowly through. The crowd of prisoners starts to disperse.

“They’re probably taking the poor sod out to be shot,” says Harry.

“What for?”

“Does it matter? For anything. Or nothing. Don’t be deceived, James. We’re their prisoners and they can do what they like to us. We’re not protected. The Geneva Conventions don’t guarantee our safety. The Goons can breach those any time they choose.”

T
HE BABY
redstarts grow bigger and more demanding. They are constantly hungry, their cries louder, more plaintive every day. The adult birds forage for food during all available daylight hours. After the parents deliver the worm or flying insect or caterpillar to the chicks, they fly away from the nest with an energetic spurt, which James feels can only be relief. For a moment they are free of their duties—but only for a moment. After the little kick of freedom, they are back to the onerous task of finding fresh food to feed the inexhaustible chicks, which, it seems, are perpetually hungry.

The birds have become used to his presence, or they’ve learned to ignore it. James can’t decide which it is. They have their routines, the birds and him, and James likes to think that the redstarts are not influenced by his surveillance, but simply continue on with their lives in ignorance of his. But he knows this is probably not the case, and he has to add into his research the factor of himself. To what extent his presence alters the birds’ behaviour, he cannot know, but it is safe to assume that there is some alteration of their habits, and even though they become accustomed to James, they do not necessarily prefer that he is there, watching them.

A
SIDE FROM
the delivery of the Red Cross packages, the most highly anticipated event is the arrival of the post. Every fortnight or so, James receives a letter from his parents telling him their news. None of it is particularly interesting or relevant to him, but he is always reassured by their descriptions of the English weather and the announcement of what is currently growing in their little garden. It is comforting to think of his parents’ lives continuing on as usual, or at least their presenting it to him as though this is the case.

Occasionally James’s wife, Rose, writes to him, her letters sometimes now weeks apart. She used to write much more regularly, and even though the content of her letters hasn’t changed, James worries about the gap between them. Rose always begins her letter by apologizing for this, but he is not entirely convinced by her claims of busyness. She has her war job, the hens, and her Victory Garden, but there should still be enough time left over to write her husband a letter every day. He receives more letters from his sister, Enid, than he does from his wife.

The letter James receives from Rose today is all about her work as a blackout warden. She has taken on this job since his capture, walking the streets of their village and cautioning the inhabitants about the chink in their curtains that allows the light from their houses to bleed out into the thick country dark.

Rose writes about what she sees through the windows of the houses, and James imagines that she stands for a while in the road, watching, before she taps on the front door to issue her warning.

She writes her letters to him in the present tense, as though she is relaying what she is seeing just as it occurs in front of her.

I envy those who think of their lives to the exclusion of all else
, she writes.
It would be so good to forget about the war, even for an instant.

James reads his wife’s letter down at the river, on duty watching the redstarts. He reads in snatches, a sentence or two, before looking up to keep track of the adult birds as they return to the nest with food for their babies.

Mr. Sandler fiddles with the knobs on the wireless in his lounge. He kneels down in front of the machine, his ear turned to the speaker as he twiddles with the tuning, trying to get perfect reception for the evening’s programs. From where I stand in the garden, it looks like he is praying. Across the room, Mrs. Sandler looks up from her knitting and speaks to her husband, but I can tell that Mr. Sandler isn’t listening to his wife at all and wishes she would just shut up so he can concentrate on the more important task of tuning the wireless. He never once turns towards her voice, just presses his ear harder against the speaker.

A bird flies into the nest with a caterpillar, remaining there for exactly ten seconds and then flying out again with that little kick of relief that James is used to by now. He wishes he had a view into the nest and could see if the caterpillar was given to one of the babies or was portioned out to all.

I stand outside the Crofters’ cottage, watching sixteen-year-old Daisy dancing by herself in the front room, swaying to music that I can’t hear. It is almost as though Mr. Sandler’s wireless program has skipped down the row of cottages and ended up in Daisy’s sitting room.

Rose and James had been married for only six months when James was captured. They have no children. Rose, in her husband’s absence, has got herself a dog named Harris; she accompanies Rose on the nightly blackout rounds and sometimes makes an appearance in her letters.

It’s a cool evening, the moon not yet up and the darkness thick as fog; a twisty wind conspires in the tops of the trees. Harris has gone ahead to look under Mr. Shepherd’s hedge, where she once flushed a partridge, and then she heads farther down the road to the low wall, where she’s hopeful there will be a cat to chase.

The dog makes James a little anxious because Rose never discussed it with him first. She just went ahead and got the dog, saying to James that she needed the company, and that James would like Harris. While this may be true, and while James has nothing against the fact that Rose wanted a dog, it still makes him uneasy that she didn’t think it necessary to consult him first. As husband and wife, they’ve spent almost as many months apart as together, and he could be in the camp for years yet, if the Kommandant is to be believed. He worries that instead of holding him fast in her memory, Rose is forgetting her husband and getting too used to a life without him.

The war has taken its toll on love. At least once a week, one of the men in the camp receives a letter from his beloved saying that she has left him for another. To deal with the crushing blow that these letters level, the prisoners have developed a system to help the abandoned lover address his grief. The Dear John letter is pinned to one of the communal bulletin boards so that everyone in the camp can read it. The public aspect of this gesture takes away some of the private grief suffered by the individual, and so the message of the letter ceases to be as powerful to its recipient.

James is always a little afraid of receiving one of these letters, and this is another reason why he wants to fashion a new thread of discussion in his correspondence with his wife. He doesn’t want his words home to degenerate into a litany of complaint—or worse yet, into self-pitying need. He wants it to seem as though the camp does not exist at all, as though he is writing to Rose what he would have written to her from anywhere. The letters do not depend on his being a prisoner. He is convinced, having seen enough Dear John letters on the bulletin board, that the secret to not being left is always to have something novel to offer his wife, even at this great distance and under these trying circumstances. The natural world is one of their commonalities. Even though James and Rose had met in the city, they deliberately chose to live in the country because they both loved the countryside and wanted to spend their free time walking on the heath. They enjoyed the proximity to nature allowed by their little cottage on the edge of the Ashdown Forest.

James writes to Rose every week, trying always to be upbeat, cheerful. He works on his latest letter at the table in his bunkhouse room.

Dearest Rose, I have had the good fortune to have found a nest of redstarts and have decided to observe them for the duration of my stay here.

He never mentions the camp or the conditions. This is partly because he is afraid of the censor’s hand. It is impossible to talk about events at the camp in any detail to those on the outside. Last year the prisoners had a good laugh over a letter from Richard Hatton to his grandmother that was returned to him as undeliverable. A particularly enthusiastic censor had blacked out the whole letter, leaving only the salutation and the closing.
Dear Granny, Love Richard
.

James fears the censor, but he also wants to spare Rose any of his suffering. He has never been much of a complainer, and it seems proper to protect his wife from his reality and concentrate instead on information that will be cheering to her. He doesn’t say that the redstarts are on the other side of the barbed wire. He writes instead,
I keep a good distance from the birds so that they will not be too disturbed by my presence
.