The Somme Stations (2 page)

Lillian, I still hope to be back on Friday, but this now
depends on what the surgeon says. Give my love to the children, and tell them their father is well, as I pray that he is, or will be.

With all my love,

Lydia.

Moor View Guest House,

The Grove,

Ilkley.

October 13th, 1916

Dearest Lillian,

This has been about the worst day of my life.

Jim has a sepsis, and has been taken directly to the hospital. This is blood poisoning because of the wound to his leg. I was with him this morning; his leg and hip are fearfully swollen; he had a fever, and kept muttering about an owl. I asked him, ‘Was there an owl in the night?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘In the day.’ When Hawks came, he said this was ‘A very grave matter’ and I saw the horrible Oldfield nodding in the background. No apology for saying the ‘bone was setting satisfactorily’ after I’d told her that Jim was ill. No mention from Hawks that this poisoning comes from his re-setting of the bone. He is going to try ‘excision’, which is scraping out the poison.

When Jim had been taken from the room, and I was alone with Hawks for a moment, I said, ‘What if that doesn’t work? You will amputate the leg won’t you?’ He replied, ‘If the position is not already hopeless.’ So I thought I had said the worst thing, but evidently not. I insisted on accompanying Jim, and, on being refused – and being told that Jim would be returned to Ardenlea after four hours or so – I walked straight to the Ilkley library, where I read up on sepsis in the bone, which I think is osteomyelitis. From my reading, I dare to hope that the infection was caught in time. I am trusting to the pomposity of Hawks: he
would
say the worst, because then he will look better when he finds the cure.

I went back to Ardenlea after the four hours, to await Jim’s return from the operation. As I walked along the
drive, a tall man in a perfectly pressed uniform came towards me. He was making for the gate. He wore riding boots and a red cloth cover over his cap, and carried a valise under his arm. He touched his cap to me as we passed. The Matron, Oldfield, stood in the doorway, watching as he departed and I approached.

‘Is my husband back yet?’ I asked her.

She shook her head. ‘He will not be back until about midnight. I have just told that gentleman the same thing.’

‘Has there been some complication?’

‘I don’t know, I’m sure.’

I contemplated telling her that she was a sadist, plain and simple. Then I thought to ask: ‘Who
was
that man?’ (We could still hear his brisk retreating footsteps on the gravel of the drive.)

‘He’s in the Military Mounted Police.’

Being in a kind of daze, I said, ‘Well, I didn’t see his horse.’

‘He came by train.’

‘What does he want with Jim?’

And so, Lillian, I gave Oldfield the opportunity of experiencing the most wonderful pleasure, for she said:

‘I see no reason why I shouldn’t tell you. He means to take your husband in charge.’

‘Why? On
what
charge?’

‘On a charge of murder.’

‘Well then. There has obviously been a mistake.’

‘Sergeant Major Thackeray’, she said, nodding towards the opened gate, which the man in the red-covered hat was now walking through, wheeling to the right, as though giving himself marching orders, ‘has come all the way from France expressly to bring the charge, so I shouldn’t
think
there’s been a mistake. I am to be responsible for making sure that on returning to
these premises, your husband does not quit his room before the gentleman returns in the morning.’

I might have fainted at that moment … only a light snow was beginning to fall in the gardens of Ardenlea. The snowflakes that touched my face had a reviving effect.

‘When Jim returns’, I said to Oldfield, ‘he will be unconscious.’

She nodded.

‘And he can’t walk anyway …’

She nodded again.

‘So I should have thought that keeping him here would be well within your powers.’

I turned on my boot-heel and walked. (Not that I knew where I was going.) It is now nearly midnight, and I will return to Ardenlea in a moment, posting this on the way. Not a word of this to the children, dearest. I don’t know how to thank you for all your kindness in looking after them. As you now see, I cannot hope to be there on Friday, but will write again tomorrow.

With all my love, as ever,

Lydia.

In the North Eastern Railway police office, which faced on to platforms four and thirteen at York station, Constable Scholes was telling how he’d lately encountered a man who had been carrying an owl in a Third Class carriage of a train going between Leeds and York. Scholes was talking, as ever, to his best pal, Constable Flower. Being only constables, the two shared a desk, and at that moment Flower was sitting at it and Scholes was sitting
upon
it, by which any man who knew the office would have been able to tell that the Chief wasn’t about. I was listening in while assembling the papers for the prosecution on a charge of Indecent Exposure of a man called John Read who’d walked out of the Gentlemen’s lavatory on platform eight while in a state of undress.

But the story of the owl man had my attention for the present. He had worn the bird on his wrist, ‘like a watch’, and when asked what he was about had said the owl was his companion, and went everywhere with him.

‘I told him it was against the by-laws,’ Scholes was saying, at which Flower, who had the
Police Manual
on his knee, gave chapter and verse: ‘It’s against company by-law number eleven.’

‘Exactly,’ said Scholes. ‘So the bloke … Which number did you say again?’

‘Eleven,’ said Flower. ‘No wait, that’s “Entering or Leaving a Train in Motion”.’ He turned the pages of the book. ‘Here we
are: by-law fourteen. “Carriage of Animals in … a Carriage.” Let’s see what he would have been liable for.’

‘It makes no odds, since I don’t have his name and address,’ said Scholes.

‘Forty shillings maximum for a first offence,’ said Flower, ignoring Scholes, ‘or five pounds if he’s done it before.’

‘I never took his name,’ Scholes repeated. ‘I said to him, “You’ll get off at York, and you’ll walk quickly out of the station and you’ll not come back with that thing.” He said, “Will I now?” I said, “Yes, you flipping well will.” He said “Well how do you expect the owl to get back to Leeds?”’

‘It could fly,’ Flower put in. ‘It was a bird, after all.’

‘It was attached to his wrist by a leather strap.’

‘And what happened then?’ asked Flower.

‘He got off the train and went through the ticket gate.’

The interesting part of their conversation was over, so I looked up from the cards and said, ‘Where’s the Chief?’ at which Scholes climbed off the desk. (The word ‘Chief’ was enough to make him do it.)

‘Old station, I think,’ said Flower.

The old station, which was across the way from the new one, had been taken over by the military, and the Chief was very thick with that lot. I looked down at the papers relating to Read. Without paying attention to the detail of the case (he seldom did
that
) the Chief had expressed surprise that I’d arrested a bloke on this charge. ‘I’ve never run a fellow in for indecent exposure,’ he’d told me, seeming to take a pride in the fact, and the
Police Manual
did urge that the greatest care be taken in such cases, since ‘the charges are sometimes made by nervous or hysterical females on the most slender evidence’.

Where Read had gone wrong was in exposing himself to the wife of an Alderman and the sister of the Chairman of the York Corporation Finance Committee, and there’d been nothing hysterical about that pair. They had testified that Read’s
member had been clearly displayed but was ‘not in a state of tumescence’, which was an odd thing to say, as though the two were very experienced as witnesses in these sorts of cases, and usually the members
were
in a state of tumescence. (It was just the right word – I’d looked it up after questioning them.) But then again Read himself, a broken down man in the middle fifties, had had no answer to the charge. He’d left the Gentlemen’s, he told me, in ‘rather a hurry’. ‘Why?’ I asked him, and he kept silence for a long time before replying, ‘I wanted to go to the Post Office.’

I stuffed the papers back in the pasteboard envelope. Read had exposed himself on the day the war started, and I wondered whether the two events had been related. There’d been some strange behaviour since August 4th, and the numbers of Drunk and Incapables on the station had practically doubled.

I stood up and took off my suit-coat, which was something Scholes and Flower, being uniformed men, were not allowed to do – which perhaps served to remind them why they didn’t care for my company. Anyhow they both just then quit the office to go on station patrol. Scholes would take the ‘Up’ side, Flower the ‘Down’ (or the other way about), with many meetings for a chat on the footbridge. It was two-thirty on a hot, sleepy afternoon, and I had the place to myself.

I stood in the office doorway with my coat over my shoulder, and watched a London train pull out of the ‘Up’. As it moved, it revealed the platform across the way, the main ‘Down’, which was crowded with sweating excursionists, shortly to depart for points north. In the first fortnight of the war, the station had been full of trippers returning home, breaking off from holidays because of the emergency, but now folk had started going away again, and the ones who’d come back and lost their holidays as a result felt daft. Buffets in brown paper and bottles of lemonade were being passed out among the excursionists – all adults but they looked like a school party, excited at getting
their grub. Half of them didn’t know which way to face to look for the train. As I watched them, I saw Old Man Wright, the police office clerk, moving at a lick through their ranks, making for the footbridge and looking like he meant business. I knew then that something was up; that somebody would be in bother, for Wright fed on the misfortunes of others.

I turned aside from the door, closed it, retreated back into the office in spite of the heat (I was trying to banish the image of Wright, I suppose). For some reason, I walked over to the office notice-board. A photographic portrait of Constable Scholes had been pinned there. Why? I had no notion. It was not official; he was not in uniform. Perhaps he thought it flattering, and had put it up for swank. Or had someone put it there as a joke? I looked at the face, considering: moustache went down, eyes went down;
hair
went across, but Scholes had a very droopy face all told. Next to it was a detail of a York Temperance Society meeting and that I knew for a surety
was
a joke. Below this was a photograph of the new shooting range at the Railway Institute Sports Ground off Holgate. The targets were marked by signs reading ‘25 Yards’, ‘50 Yards’, ‘100 Yards’. Next to the hundred yards target, a man was lying down – ‘reclining’ as they say in photographs. It was as if he’d just scored a row of bullseyes at the hardest target, and had earned himself a good rest. This of course had been posted up by the Chief. He was always trying to get us to take up shooting – and now most of us would be doing just that, whether we liked it or not. A little further down was a card advertising a chamber concert at the Institute: Miss Leila Willoughby would be playing the violin, which took me back to Scholes. This musical notice was his doing; he played the flute. He was ‘artistic’, hence the droopy face.
Flower
ought to have been the artist, with a name like his, but of the two he was the better man in a scrap, and would bring in the Drunk and Incapables on his own, whereas Scholes would whistle for assistance.

I heard bootsteps from outside; the door banged open, bringing in the noise of a train whistle, traces of a hot black cloud, and Old Man Wright. I distinctly recall thinking: there’s a bloody great empty space in the middle of this notice-board, when Wright leant over my shoulder and fixed a notice into that very spot with a single pin. I read:

In order to meet the case of those who would prefer to enlist among men whom they know, application has been made to Lord Kitchener for authority to enrol a North Eastern Railway Battalion of his new Army, and if sufficient support is given it is hoped that sanction will be obtained. The Directors feel that many men who might otherwise hesitate to serve among strangers would be prepared to join such a battalion.

All trained men 45 years of age and under and untrained men 19 to 35 years of age should apply to their District Officers for full information.

‘Bugger,’ I said, and Wright gave out a single bark of laughter. I now did turn about, and he was watching me with a kind of smirk.

‘Actually, I’d been
hoping
the Company would form its own unit,’ I said.

Wright pulled a face, as if to say: ‘Don’t come it.’

‘You’ll be training at Hull,’ he said. ‘They’ve commandeered Alexandra Dock.’

I figured the docks at Hull, and could picture nothing but rain.

Wright himself was out of it, of course, being in the middle sixties, as was the Chief. The difference was that the Chief
resented the fact. The first Kitchener appeals posted up about York had asked for men aged up to thirty, which had put
me
out of it as well, since I was thirty-two, but the Chief had offered – with no prompting on my part – to write me a special letter of recommendation to get round the difficulty. That would not now be necessary, since the War Office seemed to be raising the upper age limit by the week.

‘I must do my duty,’ I said to Old Man Wright, ‘England’s in peril.’

‘Too bloody true,’ he said, sitting down at his desk and unfolding that day’s edition of the
Yorkshire Evening Press
. His head was grey, bald and too small – like a turkey’s head, which he now began moving from side to side.