We shall all be changed.
How those words used to run through me like fire. Whether or not I believed them didn’t matter. They promised that the world was greater than I knew.
How many books had Mr Dennis in his library? Hundreds. Thousands, even. Frederick had textbooks, too. Kennedy’s
Latin Primer
, Durell’s
Elementary Problem Papers
, Panting’s
English Grammar
, Laboulaye’s
Contes Bleus
. . .
The Oxford Book of English Verse
, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. That was the most important of all. Later I found out that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was a Cornishman, born not forty miles away, up in Bodmin.
Frederick would toss the books to me when he was finished with them, as if they meant nothing. I could open
The Oxford Book of English Verse
at any page, and he would know nothing of what was on it. And yet he must have studied it. I was mystified, and then I would flatter myself with a touch of scorn for his laziness. It took me years to realise that Frederick was not lazy. I couldn’t believe that he could fail to learn, if he wanted to, with everything he needed set in front of him. I never knew how to describe what it was that Frederick had. He made it seem as if the way he did things was the only possible way that they could be done. When I realised that he couldn’t read a poem once over and know it, as I could, it made me think that there was something freakish in the gift. He laboured to learn the long lists of declensions that his school gave him. Mr Dennis read Frederick’s school report and hired a tutor for the summer holidays.
I took
The Oxford Book of English Verse
from him one day when we were lying in a hollow above the cliffs. I read aloud the poem he was learning:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
It was the kind of stuff that I liked then. I had just time to finish declaiming it before Frederick snatched the book from me.
‘
You
haven’t got to learn it.’
‘I know it already,’ I said.
‘You infernal blowviator.’
‘It’s true.’
Frederick held the book against his chest, pages inward. He’d known for years that I could tell him any story through, if I’d read it once, but this was different. ‘All right then. Cough it up.’
‘
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance . . .’
I went on to the end.
‘Do that again,’ said Frederick, staring at me as if there was a trick he hadn’t been quick enough to spot. He flipped the book open at another page and held it towards me. It was Lord Byron:
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this . . .
Twice more Frederick opened the book at a random page, and tested me. Twice more I recalled the words perfectly. Something changed then. I couldn’t read his Greek but I could read Latin. I didn’t understand it and I mispronounced it, but I could learn it as easy as breathing. Then I wished I’d never done it, because Frederick said that he would tell his father. For a moment my mind was flooded with impossibilities. Mr Dennis would clap me on the shoulder and say, ‘My boy, this is quite remarkable.’ He would send me to school with Frederick. I would leave Mulla House. I would become—
What would I become? Besides, Mr Dennis had no interest in poetry, or Greek or Latin. He hadn’t read a single one of his own books. Frederick had to learn what a gentleman should learn. The things he learned had no importance in themselves. Mr Dennis would be embarrassed if I showed off my tricks to him, as if Frederick had brought in a performing monkey.
‘Don’t tell him,’ I said.
‘You fatuous ape, why not?’
‘You’re the fatuous ape if you don’t know,’ I said, using his words, feeling them go wrong in my mouth. I got up and left him. I didn’t speak to him again for the rest of his holiday.
I have all those poems in my head. They swarm, crowding me like bees. I don’t think that I even want them any more. I want the dead to be raised incorruptible, but I know that won’t happen.
She’s wide awake now, the collie bitch. She hasn’t stirred but her eyes are on me. My hands keep on stroking her, as if they have a life of their own. She lies sideways, showing me her soft belly.
I might have gone through my whole life without knowing how good I’d be with a bayonet. Our bayonet instructor was a fat, overage sergeant who’d never been in France. He told us to go for the groin or the breastbone. But if you get a bayonet in a man’s groin, he won’t care what he does to get it out. He’ll grab the blade and hold on even though his hands are cut to ribbons. And if you go for the breastbone, the blade will stick, or skid, and go nowhere. You need the knack, to see which way a man will go, and be there first.
Sergeant Flint’s arse looked like a woman’s. We called him Fanny Flinto. We heard that Fritz had bayonet blades that were saw-toothed, not like ours. I feinted, parried, struck. He had us charging uphill, bayonets fixed, yelling like lunatics.
I was good at it, that’s all. But a live man doesn’t work like a straw dummy. Your blade comes out of the dummy, clean as it went in. It’s not just the blood and slime that comes out of a man, but the fact that he won’t let go. Or his body won’t. And in training there’s Fanny Flinto screaming, ‘Stick un, stick the bugger! Get un in the guts!’ but you don’t think about what guts contain, because you don’t know. You stick your bayonet in the right place inside a living man and it will come out with shit on it. It sticks to the blade, and you smell it when you clean your weapon.
I say that as if we were using our bayonets all the time, but we weren’t. We didn’t ever charge uphill, yelling, into a row of men like straw dummies. We used our bayonets at night, on patrol, because they were quiet. We used our knives, and Mr Tremough had his revolver.
That night with Frederick, in the dark of the shell-hole, it was a bayonet I was afraid of, more than a grenade even. We’d failed. The raid was a disaster and those who could get away had gone. The rest were dead, or too injured to move, like Frederick. We were cornered if the Germans came and shone a light down. I had no idea where we were, although I could tell the direction of the line from the firing. We were in no-man’s-land, and no-man’s-land was as big as Africa once you were in it at night. There was water in the bottom of the shell-hole. Old rotten water, full of stinking things. There was a dugout in the side, where we were hidden. Wire ran from it up to the surface. They must have run a telephone wire out here, into no-man’s-land, so they could crouch in the dugout, listening, and send back messages. On the earthen shelf, someone had left a tin mug. I hoped there might be water in the mug, but it was empty. It made my skin crawl, to think of that German coming back for his mug. This was his hole, and we were in it.
The lower part of Frederick’s leg was bad. I lit a match from the box I carried in my tunic pocket, and cupped the flame to hide it. The calf of his boot was ripped open. Dirt had blown into the wound. There was shrapnel in it, and the flesh around was mushy. I saw a splinter big enough to grasp, but I didn’t dare draw it out. The match singed my hand, and I dropped it in the water below us. I knew enough. I unfixed the blade of my bayonet, and gripped the leather of his boot in my right hand so I could cut it with my left. The blade was too clumsy. I had my knife, and I tried with that, but he groaned and shook all over until I had to stop. I lit another match, shielding it carefully with my hands, even though we were right into the back of the dugout. I couldn’t get his boot off, because there was nothing above it I could safely get a hold of. There was a lot of bleeding, not pumping blood, just heavy, pulpy bleeding. I unwound the cotton tape from the top of my puttees, tied the pieces together and wrapped it around his thigh, tight enough to slow the blood. Frederick didn’t seem to know what had happened to him. He’d been hit on the head too, which might have been the reason. I felt his forehead and there was a bloody ridge. He wasn’t unconscious though. I could just about see his eyes, and his pupils shrank from the light of the match. I was afraid that any moment he would start to feel his leg and make a noise so that they’d be bound to hear us. I wound off more of my puttees and made a gag ready.
The Germans must have been in this shell-hole all the time, listening to us, while we thought that they knew nothing of the raid. Once the shelling stopped, that would be the time for them to retake their dugout. I had my rifle. I fixed my bayonet again. But it was more than likely they’d lob grenades down before retaking it. That’s what I’d have done. Our one chance was that they wouldn’t know we were here. They’d think they were retaking an empty shell-hole, and that could wait, now that the raid was over. Besides, they wouldn’t want to blow up a listening post that had already proved so useful.
The collie whines. She’s had enough of this. I lift my hand off her, and she gets up, shakes herself all over as if she’s been in the water, and whines again. She wants to go home.
‘All right, my girl,’ I say, stooping over her, but she doesn’t like me as much as she did. Sometimes I think a dog can see right through you, into the thoughts you hide even from yourself.
8
As regards dress and arrangements generally, no part of the training should be perfunctory, that is to say, nothing should be left to the imagination.
THIS TIME THERE
is a smell of food in the hall of Albert House. Felicia comes to the door with the child in her arms. The two of them look at me out of eyes that are shaped the same, then Felicia smiles as if she’s glad to see me.
‘This is Jeannie,’ she says, and the baby turns her head into her mother’s shoulder. Her hair is as fine as thistledown, and pale. There was never hair like that in the Dennis family. It must come from Harry Fearne.
‘It’s all right, Jeannie. Daniel’s our friend,’ says Felicia, but Jeannie won’t look up. ‘She’s tired. I was just going to put her to bed.’
I watch Felicia move about the kitchen with the child on her hip.
‘She still has her bottle at night,’ she says, and heats milk in a little pan before pouring it into a newfangled-looking feeding bottle. I watch everything she does. Her hands move surely. Of course they do, she must have done this hundreds of times. Felicia being a mother is new to me, but not to her.
‘I won’t be long,’ she says, and goes off with the child and the bottle. I look around the kitchen. The range is lit, and a pot is simmering on one of the plates. A dense, savoury smell rises with the steam. My mouth floods with saliva. It seems a long time before Felicia comes back.
‘She’s hard to settle. I sit and sit, and as soon as I move, she rears up.’
I know nothing about little children. I thought they lay down and slept when it was time for bed.
‘Will you have some chicken soup?’ asks Felicia.
‘Did you make it?’
‘I’m learning. I ask Dolly what to do, and I write down what she says. She brought up a boiling fowl this morning, and cut it into joints. I did the rest.’
‘It smells good.’
‘I hope so.’ Felicia picks up a pot-holder, opens the lid and steps back as a gout of steam blows at her. She approaches the pot again, cautiously. ‘I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like,’ she says.
‘Let me see.’
‘All right,’ she says doubtfully, and passes the pot-holder to me. I look into the pot, where four quarters of chicken swim in yellow globules of fat. There are carrots and onions, and a bunch of thyme and bay, tied together.
‘What my mother used to do was take off the fat from the surface with a piece of bread,’ I remember.
‘Could you do that, Dan?’
‘Cut me off the heel of the loaf.’
I take a large fork, lower the bread and skim the surface of the soup with it. Sure enough, the yellow globules of fat are sucked into the dough. I lift the bread before it can dissolve, and lay the soggy slice on a plate.
‘What did you use to do with the bread?’
‘Eat it.’
The soup is too liquid, but the chicken is already cooked through. ‘The stock needs to be boiled down,’ I tell her, ‘but you don’t want to cook the chicken to rags.’ I lift the chicken pieces one by one, with the fork, and put them on a board. ‘How does the range work, Felicia? Is there a plate that’s hotter than the others?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Families like the Dennises live in their own houses like children, not knowing how things work. And now that all the people who used to run the house for them have gone, Felicia is next door to helpless. I pass my hand over the iron plates and judge that the front left one is the hottest. I move the pot across. Sure enough, after a few minutes bubbles start to swarm beneath the surface. My mother put barley into soup, to thicken it, but Felicia doesn’t know if there is any.
‘It’ll taste as good without,’ I say.
Felicia cuts more slices of bread, and when the soup has boiled thick enough, I drop the chicken pieces back into it to heat through.
‘There’s so much of it,’ says Felicia, as I fill our plates and put them on the kitchen table. She’s right; there seems to be almost as much soup left in the pot as there was before.