No Comebacks (28 page)

We both had our heads bowed at the time and Bernadette looked up at me. I looked as puzzled as she. I looked at Madame Preece. She smiled happily and went on eating. Bernadette gave an imperceptible nod in the direction of the farmer. I turned to him. He was still wolfing his soup and bread.

'I beg your pardon?' I said.

He gave no sign of having heard, and several more spoonfuls of soup, with more large chunks of bread, went down his gullet. Then twenty seconds after my question, he said quite clearly in English, 'Forty-four. To Bergerac. Kilometres. Forty-four.'

He did not look at us; he just went on eating. I glanced across at Madame Preece. She flashed a happy smile as if to say, 'Oh yes, my husband has linguistic talents.' Bernadette and I put down our spoons in amazement.

'You speak English?' I asked the farmer.

More seconds ticked away. Finally he just nodded.

'Were you born in England?' I asked.

The silence lengthened and there was no reply. It came a full fifty seconds after the question.

'Wales,' he said, and filled his mouth with another wad of bread.

I should explain here that if I do not, in the telling of this tale, speed up the dialogue somewhat, the reader will die of weariness. But it was not like that at the time. The conversation that slowly developed between us took ages to accomplish because of the inordinately long gaps between my questions and his answers.

At first I thought he might be hard of hearing. But it was not that. He could hear well enough. Then I thought he might be a most cautious, cunning man, thinking out the implications of his answers as a chess player thinks out the consequences of his moves. It was not that. It was simply that he was a man of no guile at all, of such slow thought processes that by the time he had ingested a question, worked out what it meant, devised an answer to it and delivered the same, many seconds, even a full minute, had elapsed.

I should perhaps not have been sufficiently interested to put myself through the tiresomeness of the conversation that occupied the next two hours, but I was curious to know why a man from Wales was farming here in the depths of the French countryside. Very slowly, in dribs and drabs, the reason came out, and it was charming enough to delight Bernadette and myself.

His name was not Preece, but Price, pronounced in the French way as Preece. Evan Price. He was from the Rhondda Valley in South Wales. Nearly forty years earlier he had been a private soldier in a Welsh regiment in the First World War.

As such he had taken part in the second great battle on the Marne that preceded the end of that war. He had been badly shot up and had lain for weeks in a British Army hospital while the Armistice was declared. When the British Army went home he, too ill to be moved, had been transferred to a French hospital.

Here he had been tended by a young nurse, who had fallen in love with him as he lay in his pain. They had married and come south to her parents' small farm in the Dordogne. He had never returned to Wales. After the death of her parents his wife, as their only child, had inherited the farm, and it was here that we now sat.

Madame Preece had sat through the oh-so-slow narration, catching here and there a word she recognized, and smiling brightly whenever she did so. I tried to imagine her as she would have been in 1918, slim then, like a darting active sparrow, dark-eyed, neat, chirpy at her work.

Bernadette too was touched by the image of the little French nurse caring for and falling in love with the huge, helpless, simple-minded overgrown baby in the lazaret in Flanders. She leaned across and touched Price on the arm.

'That's a lovely story, Mr Price,' she said.

He evinced no interest.

'We're from Ireland,' I said, as if to offer some information in return.

He remained silent while his wife helped him to his third portion of soup.

'Have you ever been to Ireland?' asked Bernadette.

More seconds ticked away. He grunted and nodded. Bernadette and I glanced at each other in delighted surprise.

'Did you have work there?'

'No.'

'How long were you there?' 'Two years.'

'And when was that?' asked Bernadette.

'1915... to 1917.'

'What were you doing there?' More time elapsed.

'In the Army.'

Of course, I should have known. He had not joined up in 1917. He had joined up earlier and been posted to Flanders in 1917. Before that he had been in the British Army garrison in Ireland.

A slight chill came over Bernadette's manner. She comes from a fiercely Republican family. Perhaps I should have let well alone; not probed any more. But my journalist's background forced me to go on asking questions.

'Where were you based?'

'In Dublin.'

'Ah. We come from Dublin. Did you like Dublin?'

'No.'

'Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.'

We Dubliners tend to be rather proud of the place. We would prefer foreigners, even garrison troops, to appreciate our city's qualities.

The earlier part of ex-Private Price's career came out like the latter part, very, very, slowly. He had been born in the Rhondda in 1897, of very poor parents. Life had been hard and bleak. In 1914, at the age of seventeen, more to secure food, clothing and barracks to live in than out of patriotic fervour, he had joined the Army. He had never gone beyond private soldier.

For twelve months he had been in training camps as others went off to the front in Flanders, and at an army stores depot in Wales. In late 1915 he had been posted to the garrison forces in Ireland, quartered in the chill of barracks at Islandbridge on the south side of the River Liffey in Dublin.

Life, I had to suppose, had been boring enough for him to have said he did not enjoy Dublin. Sparse barrack dormitories, low pay even for those days, and an endless, mindless round of spit and polish, buttons, boots and beds; of guard duty on freezing nights and picquets in the streaming rain. And for leisure ... not much of that either on a soldier's pay. Beer in the canteen, little or no contact with a Catholic population. He had probably been glad to have been posted away after two years. Or was he ever glad or sad for anything, this lumbering, slow man?

'Did nothing ever happen of interest?' I asked him finally, in some desperation.

'Only once,' he replied at last.

'And what was that?'

'An execution,' he said, absorbed in his soup.

Bernadette put down her spoon and sat rigid. There was a chill in the air. Only Madame, who understood not a word, and her husband, who was too insensitive, were oblivious. I should definitely have left well alone.

After all, in those days a lot of people were executed. Common murderers were hanged at Mountjoy. But hanged. By prison warders. Would they need the soldiery for that? And British soldiers would be executed too, for murder and rape, under military regulations after court martial. Would they be hanged or shot? I did not know.

'Do you remember when it was, this execution?' I asked.

Bernadette sat frozen.

Mr Price raised his limpid blue eyes to mine. Then he shook his head. 'Long time ago,' he said. I thought he might be lying, but he was not. He had simply forgotten.

'Were you in the firing party?' I asked.

He waited the usual period while he thought. Then he nodded.

I wondered what it must be like to be a member of a firing party; to squint along the sights of a rifle towards another human being, tethered to a post 60 feet away; to pick out the white patch over the heart and hold the foresight steady on that living man; on the word of command to squeeze the trigger, hear the bang, feel the thud of recoil; to see the bound figure beneath the chalk-white face jerk and slump in the ropes. Then go back to barracks, clean the rifle and have breakfast. Thank God I had never known nor ever would.

'Try to remember when it was,' I urged him.

He did try. He really did. You could almost feel the effort. Eventually he said, '1916. In the summer I think.'

I leaned forward and touched his forearm. He raised his eyes to mine. There was no devious-ness in them, just patient inquiry.

'Do you remember ... try to remember ... who was the man you shot?'

But it was too much. However he tried, he could not recall. He shook his head at last.

'Long time ago,' he said.

Bernadette rose abruptly. She flashed a strained, polite smile at Madame.

'I'm going to bed,' she told me. 'Don't be long.'

I went up twenty minutes later. Mr Price was in his armchair by the fire, not smoking, not reading. Staring at the flames. Quite content.

The room was in darkness and I was not going to fiddle with the paraffin lamp. I undressed by the light of the moon through the window and got into bed.

Bernadette was lying quiet but I knew she was awake. And what she was thinking. The same as me. Of that bright spring of 1916 when on Easter Sunday a group of men dedicated to the then unpopular notion that Ireland should be independent of Britain had stormed the Post Office and several other large buildings.

Of the hundreds of troops being brought in to flush them out with rifle and artillery fire — but not Private Price in his boring Islandbridge barracks, or he would have mentioned the occasion. Of the smoke and the noise, the rubble in the streets, the dead and the dying, Irish and British. And of the rebels being finally led out of the Post Office defeated and disowned. Of the strange green-orange-white tricolour they had hoisted atop the building being contemptuously hauled down to be replaced again by the Union Jack of Britain.

They do not teach it now in schools of course, for it forms no part of the necessary myths, but it is a fact for all that; when the rebels were marched in chains to Dublin docks en route to jail in Liverpool across the water, the Dubliners, and most among them the Catholic poor, threw refuse and curses at them for bringing so much trouble upon Dublin's head.

It would probably have ended there but for the stupid, crazy decision of the British authorities to execute the sixteen leaders of the rising between 3 and 12 May at Kilmainham Jail. Within a year the whole mood had changed; in the election of 1918 the independence party swept the country. After two years of guerrilla war, independence was finally granted.

Bernadette stirred beside me. She was rigid, in the grip of her thoughts. I knew what they would be. They would be of those chill May mornings when the nail-studded boots of the firing parties rang out as they marched from the barracks to the j ail in the darkness before dawn. Of the soldiers waiting patiently in the great courtyard of the jail until the prisoner was led out to the post up against the far wall.

And of her uncle. She would be thinking of him in the warm night. Her father's elder brother, worshipped but dead before she was born, refusing to speak English to the jailers, talking only in Irish to the court martial, head high, chin up, staring down the barrels as the sun tipped the horizon. And of the others ... O'Connell, Clarke, MacDonough, and Padraig Pearse. Of course, Pearse.

I grunted with exasperation at my own foolishness. All this was nonsense. There were others, rapists, looters, murderers, deserters from the British Army, also shot after court martial. It was like that in those days. There was a whole range of crimes for which the death penalty was mandatory. And there was a war on, making more death penalties.

'In the summer,' Price had said. That was a long period. From May to late September. Those were great events in the history of a small nation, those of the spring of 1916. Dumb privates have no part to play in great events. I banished the thoughts and went to sleep.

Our waking was early, for the sun streamed through the window shortly after dawn and the farmyard fowl made enough noise to rouse the dead. We both washed, and I shaved as best I could, in the water from the ewer, and threw the residue out of the window into the yard. It would ease the parched earth. We dressed in our clothes of yesterday and descended.

Madame Price had bowls of steaming milky coffee on the kitchen table for each of us, with bread and white butter, which went down very well. Of her husband there was no sign. I had hardly finished my coffee when Madame Price beckoned me through to the front of the farmhouse. There in the cow-patted front yard off the road stood my Triumph and a man who turned out to be the garage owner. I thought Mr Price might help me with the translations, but he was nowhere to be seen.

The mechanic was voluble in his explanations, of which I understood not a word but one;
'carburateur'
he kept repeating, then blew as through a tube to remove a particle of muck. So that was it; so simple. I vowed to take a course in basic motor mechanics. He asked a thousand francs, which in those days before de Gaulle invented the new franc was about a pound sterling. He handed me the car keys and bade me goodbye.

I settled up with Madame Price, another thousand francs (you really could take a holiday abroad for little money in those days) and summoned Bernadette. We stowed the grip and climbed aboard. The engine started at once.

With a final wave Madame disappeared inside her house. I backed the car once and turned for the highway running past the entrance.