A Man of his Time Read online

  ‘Shut your gravy-box, and look after your precious cargo. I’ve got this beast to manage.’

  Oliver’s fingers reached for the opposite pocket to that holding his watch. ‘What’s in there, mate? I’ll get it out for you. It ain’t good for you to struggle. We don’t want your paybook getting covered in blood. Ah, it looks like letters. You don’t need ’em, unless you want to make a poultice out of the paper. Maybe there’s a ten-bob note inside. No, there ain’t. What’s this, though?’ He opened a gap in the covering, let the wind take the letters away. ‘I suppose it’s good there’s something on your mind, but don’t upset yourself, I’ve put ’em back. What’s this in the other pocket? A soldier carrying a folded handkerchief! There’ll be plenty of clean hankies where you’re going, and lots of nice nurses to mop you up.’

  Oxford colleges and spires showed under a low sky from the top of the hill. An artillery column stalled them at the Witney road, men marching behind the shining barrels. ‘They’re so smart that the sergeants aren’t swearing at them,’ the corporal said in wonder, as the gunners stopped for nothing and went on.

  Over the stream beyond Botley the road was taken up by carts and charabancs, motors and pony traps, wagons and omnibuses, neither space nor order in the eagerness to progress or disentangle. The corporal cracked his whip as they passed the station, a whiff of marmalade from Frank Cooper’s factory. ‘Makes your mouth water,’ the orderly called.

  The corporal tugged this way and that at the reins. ‘I could walk faster than this. At least it’s not raining so much anymore.’ He talked to himself. ‘Over the bridge and fork right, I think. It’ll take me a fortnight to dry out. Then fork left.’

  A military policeman at the Carfax crossroads, resplendent in red cap, was endeavouring to sort out the traffic. ‘We’ve got a badly-injured soldier on board, Sergeant,’ the corporal shouted. ‘Can you tell us where the Southern General Hospital is?’

  The whole six-foot-odd of him, coolly raising his swagger-stick, stopped all movement, and came over to talk. A deep fair moustache, blue eyes as hard as stone, well-filled cheeks, and Boer War medal ribbons above the left tunic pocket into which went a lanyard with no doubt a whistle on the end, made a vision of authority to be feared. ‘How bad is he?’

  ‘He’ll be lucky to get there, Sergeant.’

  He glared at the stalled traffic, as if daring a single wheel to turn, and in a blistering voice told a parson in a dog-cart to hold back and not shift till he was beckoned on. ‘He will, if I can help it,’ pointing the way onto the High Street. ‘Keep going, past St Peter’s-in-the-East, and over the bridge, then follow the Cowley road. Turn right when you come to a church. And good luck to him.’ Waving his stick, he began to sort out the congestion.

  ‘What a fucking bully he was,’ the orderly said, halfway along the High Street. ‘I thought he was going to incinerate us when he came over.’

  ‘They’re like that.’ The corporal flicked his whip. ‘That’s their trade. But we wouldn’t have got through without him. As soon as I said we had a soldier on board he was like a lamb to us.’

  Soldiers and civilians strolled along the pavements by church and college fronts, those with urgent business using what roadway was free of traffic. Officer cadets were drilling or doing physical jerks inside the quadrangles. The corporal urged his horse on. ‘It’s like trying to drive through Goose Fair on Saturday night.’ Two young women, arm-in-arm, thought him a tormenting brute, but he shook the whip at them, and they laughed on going into the Mitre Hotel.

  Morphine no longer got through to the stars or landscapes of Oliver’s mind. He clutched the bandages, to tear them away and see how much blood was there, mouth working as if in dialogue with his mother. He called in fear for Alma.

  The orderly held his hands. ‘Can you hear me when I talk to you? She must have been a nice sweetheart. But we’re nearly there, and then your troubles will be over.’

  ‘Father!’

  ‘It’s enough to break your heart,’ the corporal said. ‘This is the church the redcap mentioned. No more jerking around for him in this ramshackle contraption.’ He began the turn.

  ‘Perhaps they’ll supply us with tea before we start our way back,’ the orderly said. ‘I’m knackered already, and we’ve only done thirty miles. Having this poor bloke on board’s worn me out.’

  ‘I’ll bet it felt like three hundred miles to him.’

  ‘He’s very quiet suddenly.’ The orderly leaned for another look. Nothing to be done. Only hope he stays in his coma. Leave well alone, is all I can think.

  A couple of chaps in white overalls, chasing a tennis ball around the yard, took little notice of their cart entering the gate. Too common a sight for them to jump, but recalling the redcap’s method the corporal raged that they had a dying man on board, and would they look sharp and give them a hand?

  They unloaded the limp body onto a trolley, while others opened doors into reception. The nurse behind her glass office pressed a button, while the corporal showed his chits to a medical officer.

  Oliver’s face suggested little more wrong than had been sustained on rugger or football field – common soldiers could be so damned rough – but on turning the head the doctor called: ‘Wheel him to the lift,’ and to a nurse: ‘He’s to be made ready for the operating theatre.’

  ‘That’s our job done,’ the corporal said.

  ‘Now we can get our tea and buns.’

  ‘Not before we’ve watered the horse. He’s got to get us back to Hungerford. I don’t suppose he’s done sixty miles in one day before.’

  After such duty by the stables the corporal talked to the nurse behind the desk about a meal. ‘Matron will give you a chit,’ she said, ‘for the other-ranks’ mess. I’ll call her.’

  The orderly looked at his watch before sitting at the trestle-table. ‘We’d better hurry, or we won’t get back till midnight, and it’s church parade tomorrow.’

  Cold potatoes, two slices of bully beef, a scoop of cabbage and a chunk of bread covered their plates.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  The orderly took a long drink at his mug of tea. ‘I’ve always had it. The old man gave it me as a present when I joined up.’

  The corporal gripped his wrist. ‘You lying thief. You’ve nicked a dying man’s watch.’

  He drew the hand away. ‘You want to be careful what you’re saying.’

  ‘That’s Burton’s ticker. Hand it over. I’ll see it gets back to his family – if he dies.’

  ‘It’s mine, I tell you.’

  ‘It was for an hour. Say goodbye to it.’

  ‘You’ll only keep it for yourself.’

  ‘If you don’t give it me I’ll knock you to the ground. And I’ll make a report. Never in my born days have I known such a thing. And as well as that, I’ll have that postal order you took.’

  ‘Postal order?’

  ‘You went through his pockets. Thought I was blind? Didn’t know I had eyes in my arse, did you? A slip of paper it was, so it must have been a postal order. If you don’t hand it to me jildi-like, I’m going to shake you up and down in front of the nurses till they see what tiny bollocks you’ve got.’

  He gave up his loot. ‘A right mate you are. Can’t we go shares?’

  ‘I’m not your mate. I’m an NCO in a crack cavalry regiment.’ He folded the paper and put the watch in his pocket. ‘Now that you’ve handed it over no more will be said, but just keep out of my way from now on. I don’t think that sergeant-redcap at the crossroads would show much concern for your face if I told him what you’d done. I only hope the Germans put a bullet through your windpipe as soon as we get overseas. Now let’s eat our grub. It’ll be dark in an hour.’

  NINETEEN

  Morgan knocked raindrops from his billycock hat. ‘There won’t be many horses left soon, with so many taken by the army. I can’t see a lot coming back. Soldiers don’t know how to look after them.’

  Oswald hammered a shoe on carefully be
cause his father watched from the doorway. Burton hadn’t felt well on getting out of bed, eyes less sharp and tongue coated, not from boozing but a touch of the ague – or age, he wondered – that a lot had now that the autumn rain was back. To be out of sorts was rare, never to be mentioned. He was tired and couldn’t fathom why, nor cared to. A pain in the back, or a crick in the groin, or a tweak at the bend of an arm, or any sign of a headache, could only be a matter of wilful disobedience on the part of the body, regarded with the contempt it deserved, and if it didn’t go away it would kill him in its own good time, but if it did go away there was nothing to worry about, and could be taken as a sign of his God-given right to go on living.

  Oswald saw him in the forge uptilt a bottle of the jollop for seedy or sluggish horses and take a couple of swigs, so that by the time the cork was back and the bottle on its shelf, he seemed more his normal self. A grind of knuckle at the eyes diminished the spinal ache. ‘Hit the nails a bit harder,’ he called. ‘They won’t bite. You should know what you’re doing after all this time.’

  Oswald wasn’t so afraid now that Oliver had gone. ‘I’m doing it my way.’

  ‘The only way is mine, so have less of your lip.’ He wished Morgan would go, and let him get on with the work to be done. ‘The army’s got plenty of motors, though; there’ll be so many on the roads we’ll have a lot less trade.’

  When Sabina came along the lane he felt anger at her being away from school, though it was strange that Mary Ann had put her in a white frock kept only for Sunday. ‘What are you doing here at this time of the day?’

  She stayed some yards off, her face a chaos of misery. ‘Oliver’s dead, our dad.’

  He looked for a few seconds. ‘What did you say?’

  Oswald stopped work, and everyone around stood like images in a frieze. She called again: ‘Oliver’s dead. He’s been killed. Mam got a telegram.’

  Burton looked into the forge, the fire at half-glow, as if Oliver might be at his usual tasks. He came outside, pausing at the door to pick up tools from the ledge. ‘What was that again?’

  She wouldn’t come closer in case he should smack her around the ears for bringing such news, and told him the third time, but this further demand had been a means of Burton keeping himself steady, and for him to remain still for a few seconds among the silent men waiting around, who seemed equally in shock, and then looking again at Sabina as if indeed wanting to boot her to Kingdom Come and back – to remark in an astonishingly sharp tone that made them realize even more how terrible the by now not unusual news must have been: ‘I damned well knew it.’

  ‘Mam says you’ve got to come home.’ Sabina, crying into her frock, agony in each noisy sob, was to remember till her dying day the whiteness of Burton’s face as he lit a cigarette. Oswald finished shoeing the horse, and Burton without thought manoeuvred it into the cartshafts. It didn’t want to go, as if also feeling that someone’s world had changed, and he got it in by force rather than persuasion, would have battered it to the ground had its resistance gone on too long.

  ‘He was such a fine young man.’ Morgan thought something must be said. ‘He was the apple of your eye.’

  Burton turned on him. ‘Shut your mouth. We don’t know if it’s true yet.’

  They did, but understood him wanting to doubt. Some mistake had been made. It couldn’t be true. They’d got the wrong man. Burton was a common name, and there’d been a mix-up. He wasn’t in France so how could he have been killed? They’d had a letter from him only the other day. ‘Go home to your mother,’ he told Oswald. ‘Take Sabina.’

  ‘She’ll want all of us.’

  ‘Do as I say. Some mistake’s been made. Close the place up, Tom,’ he said to Morgan.

  ‘I’ll be glad to.’

  ‘Drop the keys in on your way home.’

  With Oswald and Sabina gone away hand-in-hand, he put on jacket and cap, and walked in the opposite direction. The sky had fallen in. The slightest hint that Oliver had died was impossible to credit. Houses to either side went black, the church was black, the sky was black, the trams on the main road were black. Oliver wasn’t anywhere near the war, so how could he have been killed? Trees along the boulevard were black. Sabina had called out that he was dead but how could it be true? Every word of the telegram was black. The idea of Oliver being dead created the blackest of fogs.

  Let the sky fall, it could be no worse. If it was true, and the way he felt told him it was, he would find out how it happened. He would know who was responsible, though if it was the truth, then he would be dead too, and so do nothing. The world went on, and there were so many things you couldn’t do or know.

  The only building that wasn’t black was the public house, massive outside, red-bricked, and rearing to the sky. He stood at the bar yet didn’t call for a drink, features so abnormal Harry had to look twice. ‘Are you all right, Burton?’

  He struggled to open his lips. ‘A glass of whisky. A double.’ Was he dreaming? He hadn’t been aware of dreams before, hard to know what he was doing if he wasn’t in a dream, but if this was dreaming he wanted none, never having heard of dreams so heavy they would break your back, like when your son went off to the army and four months later was dead.

  Harry took a bottle from under the bar. ‘This is the best. Is anything wrong?’

  ‘They say my eldest lad’s been killed.’

  ‘Your Oliver? I didn’t know he was in France.’

  The whisky went in one watery swallow. He turned to go home and see what could be done for Mary Ann.

  He walked through Woodhouse, erect and high-headed. Everybody must know by now. On up the lane, he passed the house, unable to go there for the moment, as if a ten-foot thorn hedge held him back. A chalk mark would have been as effective. A traipse to the wood and back might stop the beating in his head, though he doubted anything would.

  Mary Ann could not stop weeping. She couldn’t be expected to, poor soul, didn’t know what to do with herself, couldn’t do anything in the scorching anguish that wouldn’t leave her alone. It was unbearable to be near her with so much pain in himself. The day after the telegram he got up at five and went to work. Life had to go on. He dragged the lads out of bed to come with him, and earn enough so that everybody in the house could eat, though the hardest labour dulled nothing.

  Children scattered as he crossed the Cherry Orchard, rooks creating a raucous palaver on the wet and misty day. The noise of redwings chattering overhead was buried by the rumble of a train. A wind told him that rain would soon be falling.

  He took a cigarette from his tin but the match wouldn’t light. The next one did, and he put the box in his pocket, at the spot where Oliver had pointed the shotgun. If only he had squeezed the trigger, and had injured me, and I had told everybody it was an accident, and then I had died, he would have been free of me, and might not have gone for a soldier. Keep your back straight, whatever you do, it hasn’t even come into me yet what’s happened, though I can feel it trying to kill me.

  The words would never go away: ‘I regret to inform you War Office reports Trooper O. Burton, South Nottinghamshire Hussars died 15 November Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy’ – neatly written on the telegraph form. A few days later a second message came: ‘The King and Queen deeply regret the loss you and the army have sustained by the death of your son in the service of his country. Their majesties truly sympathize with you in your sorrow.’ The news had been reported in the Evening Post: ‘BURTON, shoeing smith, died from a kick while shoeing a horse, 15 November, 1914.’

  The warbling of a wood pigeon mocked with its certainty of life. Those doomed to lose their firstborn son hardly know them to be the apple of their eye until they are dead. Beecher’s only lad was killed last week in France, and rows of photographs in the papers make it no better for the rest of us. As for Kitchener and their majesties, they’ve got more to gain from the war than people like us, so let them put their faces in the firing line.

  Treading grass and l
ive brambles in the wood, water soaked his trousers to the knees. The cooked smell of greenery came from the stream, where three children with their arses hanging out were putting potatoes, unearthed from Farmer Taylor’s field, into a fire. One urchin on his belly was blowing his guts away to keep a small flame alive, and when a pair seemed about to scatter at his footsteps Burton went no closer: ‘Don’t let Farmer Taylor catch you digging up his spuds.’

  One boy had a more knowing face, half-starved but merry. ‘We can run faster than him!’

  He envied their innocence. Perhaps one had lost a relative already. The world was hungry for young men, and King and Country was never a good excuse. The scum of the earth went into the army because they wanted a job and a nigger to wait on them – though Oliver had had no idea of that. If he joined up because of what I’d done more fool him, but I could blawt my eyes out, though it’s too late for that, and tears are always wasted.

  On a roundabout way home he stepped over a freshet of rain running to the bridge. In the yard he walked to the outhouse where pig food was stored, took up two buckets to fill with bran and seed potatoes. Ivy and Emily held hands and cried in their misery. ‘Stop your blawting, or I’ll give you something to blawt about.’

  The look Ivy gave was as if she wanted to strike him dead, and if only she could, he thought, what a blessing that would be, though not for her after I’d gone. ‘We can’t help it, our dad,’ Emily dared to say. ‘Oliver’s dead, and now he’s in heaven.’

  Grunting his disbelief that Oliver could be anywhere but at the undertaker’s parlour, or on his way home by now to be buried, he scooped scraps and potato mash from the barrel. The world might come to an end but pigs must be fed. What had happened had nothing to do with them, whose fate would be decided when Percy came up to slaughter one next week. He worked to dull pain, though nothing could, dumped the stuff in to let the pigs sort it how they wanted.