Valentine Joe (5 page)

‘You up for that, Cabbage? It looks like the rain'll hold off.'

Rose shrugged. The square looked quite ordinary now in the cold February light. ‘I'm up for it if you are, Grandad.'

‘Good girl. Now? This way!'

‘I'll catch up with you in a sec, Grandad,' said Rose as he strode off. ‘I just want to check something.'

She took her phone out of her bag and clicked on ‘Photos'.

It had gone.

The photo. Had gone.

For a moment the ground seemed to sag beneath Rose's feet.

It doesn't mean anything
, she told herself.
I must have deleted it by accident
. It was easily done, happened all the time. And there was nothing that strange about it anyway, it was just the angle she'd taken it from. She'd imagined it all. She was like that, always had been, Mum said – saw things that weren't there, heard whispers in the dark, footsteps on night-time pavements . . .

Once, when she was very little, she'd woken in the night to see a fairy standing on the end of her bed. It was quite a large fairy, about three feet tall, and had no wings, but Rose
had known at once what it was. She hadn't been frightened, just thought,
Oh, a fairy
, and went back to sleep, as if waking up to find a fairy standing on the end of your bed was the most ordinary thing in the world. Mum and Dad had laughed when she told them about it in the morning, and then exchanged a private look which Rose wasn't meant to see. Grandad was interested, though, and told her about holidays in Ireland when he was a boy and his nan took him out hunting for leprechauns under the fuchsia hedges.

But she'd grown out of all that now. There was nothing strange about Ypres – nothing at all. It was just an ordinary little place where something terrible had happened a long time ago.

It didn't take long to reach the edge of the city. There was a canal that ended abruptly in a sort of dock area with a couple of barges, a warehouse and a block of flats, bleak against the rain-scratched sky. It was starting to drizzle.

‘Was this a good idea, Grandad?' said Rose. ‘We haven't got an umbrella.'

‘Bit of rain won't hurt us,' he replied. ‘We've got macs!'

‘I know, but—'

‘And if we're hungry, I've got plenty of biscuits. Come on, it's not far.'

They set off along the path at the side of the canal. It was wider than canals Rose had seen back home and in pictures of Amsterdam and Venice. The water was dark and slimy looking. It seemed thicker than water, like treacle or oil, and slithered along past them, flexing like the muscle of some huge animal. It made Rose feel queasy and frightened, as if
she might be seized by an uncontrollable desire to throw herself into its greasy depths.

She didn't, though. She just walked along beside her grandad, wondering what she was doing there. Back home Grace would be preparing for her party. Grandad had said they'd probably be back in time if Rose wanted to go, but she didn't want to, not really. She didn't like parties that much any more.

She used to love them, looked forward to them for days. There'd be long sessions with Grace and Ella round each other's houses, trying on outfits, doing each other's make-up (Mum didn't approve), discussing who'd be there and laughing helplessly for hours and hours about nothing in particular. There was one boy from school she'd liked, Lewis. He was tall and funny and handsome and good at football. Nearly all the girls liked him, but for some unknown reason Rose always got the feeling he liked her best. One time, in year eight, this girl in her class had a party and invited everyone, so Rose had known that Lewis would be there. She'd spent ages planning what to wear, longer than usual, even. Grace had lent her her new top and Ella had spent ages with the hair straighteners, ironing the kinks out of Rose's hair.

And then, when they got to the party, Lewis had spent all night talking to his friends and hadn't looked at Rose once. She'd felt so disappointed she thought the world would end.

It seemed silly now, to be so upset about something so little. But she was only just thirteen when it happened. A lot had changed since then. Lewis was going out with Daisy McCallister, the prettiest, most confident girl in the year. And Rose's dad had died.

She walked on, matching her pace to Grandad's. They passed an old man fishing from underneath a green nylon tent. Grandad greeted him with a nod and the old man raised a hand in reply. Rose wondered what sort of creatures might live in the dark, greasy waters of the canal, and imagined great eyeless eel-like things like giant leeches, with grey muscular bodies and circular mouths lined with jaggy teeth. She hoped no one would ever expect her to eat them.

The path was pretty, though, with overhanging trees and a few cheerful yellow flowers like buttercups among the long grass, brave little faces turned up to the pale February sky.

‘Celandines,' said Grandad. ‘My favourite.'

He knew about flowers. His dad, Arthur, had been a gardener's boy before he left to join the army. Maybe he and Uncle George had looked at the celandines when they were here and he'd told George what they were called.

‘Terrible weed, of course,' Grandad was saying. ‘Devil to get rid of once you've got them in your garden. But I've always liked them. Cheery little blighters, come out before anything else at the end of winter when there's no other flowers about.'

Rose liked them too, with their dark-green heart-shaped leaves. She picked a little bunch. Like Mum's Valentine roses, they didn't smell of anything, but they made her feel better. She hoped they'd made George and Arthur feel better too.

‘The canal was the front line at one time,' Grandad was saying. ‘We were on this side—'

‘We'?
Rose thought.
How come it was ‘we' all of a sudden?
She didn't feel like she was on one side or the
other. Wasn't it equally awful for everybody?

‘—dug into the banks of the canal. And the Germans were over there.'

Beyond the water was a flat industrial area dominated by several giant wind turbines, their huge white arms turning lazily against the sky.

‘So it was just the canal that divided them?' said Rose.

‘No, there would've been some space between the two armies. No-man's-land, they called it. Because it didn't belong to either side. It would've been that area across the canal, I suppose.' He shook his head. ‘Wonder what the Tommies'd think if they could see it now,' he went on. ‘Blooming great what-d' you-call-'em, windmill things. Great arms waving around.'

Rose liked the turbines. They were like giant versions of those brightly coloured plastic windmills at the seaside. She remembered Dad buying her one in Brighton when she was little, and him and Mum laughing as she ran up and down the promenade to make it whizz round.

‘Heads up,' said Grandad. He'd stopped and was looking through the hedge on their left. ‘This must be it.'

A stone monument pointed up at the sky in a field where a cow peered at them with gentle eyes and a line of drool hanging from her mouth. They followed a path leading up from the canal and then they were at the gate: Essex Farm Cemetery.

Rose didn't know what she'd expected. Something bleak, grand, mournful. Vast. Graves stretching away into infinity, unimaginable numbers of men with names and no faces. Some of them without even names. Unknown soldiers.

But this wasn't like that at all. It was –
cosy.
Quite small,
like a room almost, with trees on three sides, branches moving gently. The identical gravestones were lined up, shoulder to shoulder, like tiny upright beds. And there was no sound. No birds, no cars. Nothing except the gentle
whoomp whoomp
of the turbines on the other side of the canal. There was no one else there. Just Rose and Grandad and the men lying beneath the turf.

‘They keep the grass nice, don't they?' Grandad's voice sounded loud in spite of the wind.

The grass
was
nice, bright green and velvety, as if it had just been vacuumed.

‘Quite right, too,' he went on. ‘Respect. Got to keep faith with the dead.'

Rose looked at the neat rows of identical gravestones and wondered if the soldiers lying there cared about the grass.

‘Look at this, Cabbage.' Grandad had moved towards a row of cave-like concrete rooms cut into the bank near the cemetery entrance.

‘What is it?'

Grandad was looking at his guide book. ‘Advanced dressing station. First stop for the wounded when they were brought off the battlefield.'

‘This was where the doctors treated them?' Rose couldn't believe it. ‘In these tiny little caves?' None of the rooms was much bigger than the bathroom at home, and they stank of damp and decay.

‘Yup. They patched them up here and then sent them on to a proper hospital, further away from the front line. Or home, if they were lucky.'

‘What if they weren't lucky? Grandad?' Rose knew he didn't want to say. ‘That's why the cemetery's here, isn't it?'

Grandad nodded. ‘Yes, love. For the ones that didn't make it.' He harrumphed and changed the subject, making a big fuss of rummaging in his bag. ‘Right, Uncle George, Private Thompson. I've got a reference number for him somewhere.'

‘A reference number?'

‘War Graves Commission. You get it off the internet. Surprisingly easy actually. Ah, here we go.'

Grandad produced a scrap of paper from his bag and made his way towards the cemetery, his limp more pronounced after their walk. He'd told Rose stories about being in hospital with polio when he was a boy after the war. Not this war, of course – the next one. How many wars did there have to be, before they stopped for good?

Rose lingered at the entrance, watching Grandad step carefully between the graves, looking at the numbers on the ends of the rows. Something was stopping her going into the cemetery. It felt sort of scary, like taking that first step into the classroom on your first day of school. Rose had clung to Dad's legs, hiding her face in the knees of his jeans until he'd peeled her off and given her a kiss and a gentle push into the hands of the teaching assistant. He'd said she'd be all right, and she was, she really was. But everything was different from that moment. Her world had changed from being just Dad, Mum, Grandad . . . kitchen, bedroom, park, corner shop. It had expanded to include school, teachers, dinner ladies, other children and an infinite number of new smells, sights, feelings, experiences. It wasn't a bad thing, it really wasn't. But it was big.

And this felt the same, as if she was teetering on the edge of something momentous. There was something here, in this place, buried deeper than the poor dead soldiers
beneath the grass. Something that was in the past. But it was also here now, waiting.

Waiting for her.

Rose took a deep breath and took the step, the single step, into the cemetery. Nothing happened, of course. The world didn't explode or change colour. But something was different. It was like being in a house whose owner had just left, or Dad's studio in the attic back home. Everything was still there – his paints, his canvases, his old jumper on the back of a chair. Even though he was gone, the room was still full of his presence.

It was like that in the cemetery. Rose could almost feel the dead soldiers breathing under the grass.

It's a peaceful place to spend eternity
, she thought, and took a few more steps, being careful not to stand on the graves. Across the cemetery she could see Grandad taking the rose from his buttonhole and laying it on the ground. He'd found Uncle George.

Rose tiptoed along the rows, reading the names on the headstones: Frederick, Henry, Alfred, Herbert. They sounded like old men with their old-fashioned names, but they weren't old, thought Rose, and they never would be. Then, surprisingly, a German name: Benedikt. His gravestone was different from the others, a bit rougher, more worn-looking. Poor Benedikt. Rose wondered how he'd ended up here, buried beside the men he'd been fighting.

And now, a stone with a Star of David in place of the usual cross:

A.G. Cohen

West Yorkshire Regiment

19th December 1915 Age 22

Rose thought of Mrs Cohen back in Yorkshire, crying in
her kitchen like her own mum had cried in their kitchen when Dad died. Was history full of mums crying in kitchens?

She walked on.

A grave in the middle of one of the rows caught her eye. It had more tributes than the others (most had none at all) – loads of the little papery crosses you could get everywhere in the city, a couple of bunches of shop-bought flowers, still in their cellophane, a small teddy bear wearing a poppy. That was weird. Why would anybody put a teddy on a soldier's grave?

Rose made her way towards it, and read:

V.J. Strudwick

The Rifle Brigade

14th January 1916 Age 15

Rose's heart clenched.

Fifteen?

Fifteen?
That was only one year older than she was. How could that have happened? How could it be
right
?

‘“Valentine Joe Strudwick . . .”' She hadn't heard Grandad approach. His voice sounded loud and reassuringly normal as he read from his guide book: ‘“. . . was one of the youngest soldiers known to have been killed in action in the Great War—”'

‘Valentine?' Rose interrupted. So that was what the V was for. She looked at the headstone again. Beneath his name and age and the cross was another inscription:

Not Gone From Memory Or From Love

Who chose that? His mum?

‘Name to give a boy, eh?' Grandad was saying. ‘Born on Valentine's Day, you see. I blame the mother. No dad would give a boy a name like that.'

Of course
, thought Rose. His mum chose them both: his name and the inscription on his gravestone. His poor mum. She thought again of her own mum and felt a pang. Maybe they should have persuaded her to come with them. Rose didn't like to think of her all alone. Especially not on Valentine's Day.