Her Victory (37 page)

Every letter saved, every hotel bill, steamer and railway ticket from John's holidays, as well as engineering notebooks, drawings and profiles, plans and layouts, and estimates for schemes and bridges. All packed away and hoarded, and for what? Paper well-written on, in a small neat hand as if even a margin would be so much square-inchage of waste. A clever, fun-loving, patriotic uncle dead fifty years before his time, and never known.

Another box was set aside for the war that had to come. John was a soldier at university, and later with the Territorial Force. Photographs showed him at summer camp, and it was easy to pick out the young man with dark curly hair and a handsome hawkish face in his middle twenties. A bushy moustache in later photographs made his face somewhat longer and fiercer. Other snapshots showed him laughing when caught trying to pull down a tent tope, or when a friend was preparing to take the jump at leapfrog. Happy days while they were playing, and Clara noted that it was such a pity that reality caught up with them.

During one of his leaves he stood with a sister on either side, premature regret shaping their set mouths, while John was smiling as if, under the circumstances, nothing less would do. In another photograph, next to a horned gramophone, he sat with a small white dog on his knee. There were scores of letters, neatly tied together, as well as badges and buttons in a cloth bag closed by a drawstring. A dozen damp-stained diaries and notebooks were filled with the same fine hand, except that much of the script was in pencil, and had come back from France:

‘I am sitting on a stool in a deep dugout with thirty feet of solid chalk and sandy clay above my head. I feel very safe. I am living with three of my fellow-officers in a place eight feet by twelve. It has been fine all day, and our guns have not ceased pounding. The day for our big attack has been a long time coming, but the whole army is as confident as can be, and will go over the parapet keen as mustard to get into contact with the enemy. Our men know they are his master in all but barbarous acts.

‘It is now Monday, and has been a great day. I was interrupted all night long with messages, and so got little sleep. I was up at five-fifteen, and at Brigade HQ at 5.27. At Zero Hour – 5.30 – for our operation, every gun we had opened fire and continued hard as could be until we gained our final objective. It began to rain as soon as the battle started, but stopped about 8.30. Later in the day it snowed, but cleared again. While our casualties have not been light they have not been nearly as heavy as at the Somme. Our men behaved wonderfully well, and I am quite proud of my sappers and officers. They carried things along marvellously, and obtained good results.

‘Thursday: Shells were passing over our heads when I was out with my orderly. A wind blew towards us from where the shells were landing and exploding. Suddenly we were both half smothered. We hurried forward to get out of the cloud, but soon were complaining of sore throats and chests from the gas. We should have rested, but went on over the battlefield. The padres were first and foremost. I thought one of them was an Artillery Officer, as he was helping to guide a gun over a soft bit of ground. Large parties were out collecting the dead, and when they got a certain number together, service would be read. The padres are responsible for the proper burial, and for the collection of all papers belonging to the dead. Just as it was growing dark I passed the burial party again still at their work, and I wondered how much longer they would stay. The ground we won looks so hopeless. So many wasted lives. Corpses all around. One of the enemy's support trenches was strewn with dead men from end to end. The fire from our artillery was so effective, and with such a preponderance of it, that a man behind our barrage could not easily escape death or such awful wounds as I have ever seen. I picked up the latest pattern rifle and some rounds from one of these dead Germans, and hope I shall be able to bring it home on my next leave. There are so many stories that I want to tell, but none of my
real
thoughts about what happens here can be put into words. I sometimes feel they never will be. Artillery is louder than all speech. When it is close and continuous even the shape of people's lips is distorted, and they stay calm, though the eyes tell another tale. When the barrage is still I have so much work to do, or I am too numb to think …

‘The thing I abhor more than all else in this war, after the actual loss of life, is that the dead are allowed to lie out in the open, uncovered and uncared for in so many cases. We see in and about our trenches hordes of ponderous rats. I am not sure what species, but they are certainly carnivorous. There is nothing the men out here loathe more than seeing their lumbering bodies dragging along, knowing they have fattened off their dead comrades, and may well fatten off them if ever the time comes. Numerous rat holes are seen over every grave, and our greatest delight is the destruction of these rodents who, by and large, are the only victors of these battles. And children think that Ratty in
The Wind in the Willows
is a lovable character! What a time he would have had out here! But we shall beat the Hun. We shall go on to the end, and certainly defeat him at his own game of soldiering.'

There was a pile of plain buff-coloured Army Books 152, their pages of squared paper, in which were written factual day-to-day diaries telling what time he got up and went to bed, and what the weather was like. Tom had space in his room to set the notebooks on a shelf for further reading.

When everything had been dragged clear from the cluttered boxroom he discovered a shallow cupboard built into the wall. A zinc lock held the latch in place, but he gripped hard and twisted it from the wood. Inside were measuring tapes, photographic enlargement equipment, a tripod, an engineering level, a miner's compass, a clinometer and some longish thing wrapped in a tarpaulin sheet which he carried to the living-room. The knot had been hammered into a compact ball, but he pressed and squeezed till the individual strands worked free.

‘I don't know whether I learned in the orphanage that you never
cut
string,' Tom said, ‘or in the Navy, but it's another old habit that dies hard.'

Maybe it's part of his nature, Pam thought, to waste nothing, and to let no job daunt him. ‘Makes no difference,' she said, ‘as long as you get it undone.'

She took a basket from the kitchen and went out, leaving him bemused with his clues and time-schemes, stooping among heaps of ephemera from which he tried to make sense.

Going up a narrow street from the sea, rain drove against her mackintosh. For half the way, till wind blew it clear, a stench of mothballs enveloped her, because the coat came from the hall cupboard and had not been worn for months. Water filled the gutters, and a car splashed her almost to the waist. She stepped across the street to the shops. He needed feeding. Such delving and sifting ate at him from the inside, and made his face thin.

She walked on, a zig-zag course towards the station. The wider road exposed her, icy rain flurrying when she turned towards the seafront. She would never find the flat. She would knock at a door, and someone whom she hadn't seen before would answer. She would wander around town for the rest of her life wearing Clara's mackintosh and with a bag of shopping on her arm.

‘Come in,' he said.

‘The weather's foul.' She took the mackintosh into the bathroom and hung it to dry.

He had a rifle in his grease-smeared hands. ‘I was going to come with an umbrella and meet you, but couldn't be sure of the direction.'

‘I was all right. I didn't get wet. Where did that come from?'

His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and she noticed a tattoo on his muscular forearm, a fearsome dragon twisted around the words ‘Death or Glory'. Such things decorating men's bodies made them look like woad-painted people from the Stone Age.

‘Youthful indiscretion,' he laughed. ‘Done in a drunken moment, if I remember. And I only just do!'

‘I meant the gun.'

He held it high. ‘John must have brought it back – a genuine German rifle from the Arras battlefield. There are a dozen rounds as well. I'll stow it where it came from. No good to us.'

‘Didn't do him much good, either.' She set her basket on the floor. A circular bronze plaque several inches in diameter lay on the piano top. Britannia with trident, and wreath held forth, were accompanied by a lion, surrounded by
HE DIED FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR,
and the name
JOHN CHARLES PHILLIPS
in a rectangle above the lion's head. She put it down quickly, as if it were still alive with grief and loss. The first of two telegrams said: ‘I regret to inform War Office reports Capt. J. C. Phillips died of wounds April 26th.' The second contained words of solace: ‘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.'

‘That's how it was done.' He put the rifle away. ‘Their son, and my uncle, may well have taught me a thing or two.'

‘Perhaps if he had lived,' she said, ‘you wouldn't have been packed off to the orphanage.'

2

Clara said: ‘It was too much to bear. No man was ever more destroyed by the death of his son.' It must have been the same for all fathers, and worse perhaps for all mothers. The ranks of a family would be torn into by such a death as if a cannon ball had gone through, and they would not close for years.

Percy went to the recruiting office to enlist. He was nearly sixty. Too old. He offered money if they would take him. He wanted to go to France and die, or to get his revenge for John's death. ‘He went day after day, and mother couldn't stop him. She was too grieved to try. Father was utterly broken down. One of the sergeants brought him home, and mother thanked him with half a crown for beer. The same sergeant accompanied him a few days later, but refused another half crown.

‘Mother showed me a letter,' Clara said, ‘that she would send to the War Graves Commission. John's grave should not be marked with a cross, because he was Jewish. He must be buried under the Hebrew sign, no matter what religion he gave when he enlisted. Though he had not lived as a Jew he was nonetheless one by the Law, as were all children, she insisted, born of a Jewish mother. Father was apathetic, but when he saw the letter he commented that though John had been brought up as a Christian, Rachel was quite right. And what did it matter, since both Jews and Christians believed in the same God? As far as he was concerned they were one people.'

The reply said that in spite of the case being an unusual one it was quite possible and perhaps even proper for his grave to be marked as that of a Member of the Jewish Faith, but that since his records showed him not to be one, it would be necessary to have the authority of a rabbi before her wishes as Captain Phillips' mother could be carried out. Rachel went from one synagogue to another until she obtained what she wanted from a rabbi who had known her father. Emma went with her, and the rabbi who gave his consent said that she was Jewish too, and ought not to forget it when the time came for her to choose a husband and have children.

‘We went to see John's grave after the war. Going through the customs at Boulogne was a tedious business. The French officials were very thorough, and there was a long queue, but we patiently put up with it. Father had by this time sufficiently recovered to motor us to Arras, though the roads were still bad and many villages in ruins. Lodgings were scarce, and Emma and I shared a bed at the Hotel de L'Univers.

‘The French people were everywhere sympathetic, though Emma said she smelt nothing but death, and wished she had not come. Father enjoyed the travelling, seeming to forget his troubles and constrictions as we drove along the cobbled roads admiring the scenery. But Emma and I wept at seeing him and mother clinging to each other at the cemetery. At the same time father seemed younger than for many years because, as he said, he felt closer to John than when in England. We took a camera, and there is a photograph of the rabbi-padre standing between father and mother, with Emma and me behind. We were at the grave marked by John's name and the Star of David. The Englishman in charge of the cemetery was much taken with Emma, and pressed her hand a little too hard and long, she said, when we left.'

Percy later sent fifty pounds to the rabbi ‘to be distributed, as he thought fit, among charities which would in some way benefit his co-religionists'. Percy had always given to good causes, believing that those organizations for assisting the poor and the lower classes should be amply supported by the more fortunate, who ought to give as much as they could so that it would not be necessary for the state to help – which Percy would see as the beginning of universal corruption and degradation.

Each year he took a notebook and a list from his desk and, without a secretary, stayed at home to perform the charitable duty of sending cheques to asylums, hospitals, medical colleges, missionary societies, fishermen's funds, lifeboat institutions, and soldiers' homes. There were receipts for money he had sent to an organization for ‘Promoting Christianity Among the Jews' and another for ‘Assisting Jews to Return to the Promised Land' and Clara wondered how much their mother was aware of this, knowing it was probable that Percy never told her.

He had a life-subscription of two votes to an infant asylum for orphans close to London, to which he sent extra money when an appeal was made, or when his conscience urged him – as it sometimes did on recovering from one of his nervous attacks. He visited the orphanage twice a year because, he said, it did his heart good to see children being treated well who were, after all, those beings on whom the future of the British Empire depended.

‘Father said that Emma was much like mother had been when young. She had the same reddish hair, as well as a fine figure that turned every man's head. Even women stopped to look at her. Her wit could be scorching, and her humour also had a bite to beware of. Her eyes were not good for any distance, and she tried to do without glasses, though on the visit to John's grave near Arras she wore them all the time, frameless half-lenses which, hardly visible until you were quite close, gave an attractive and mysterious glitter to her face.