The Somme Stations

York: September 1914

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:

PROPOSED FORMATION OF A NORTH EASTERN RAILWAY BATTALION

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.

‘A hundred and sixty-three killed…’ he said. Looking up at me, he added, ‘Over four thousand wounded… Peer’s son dies of wounds received at Mons,’ he was saying as I quit the police office.

According to the Yorkshire Evening Press, we kept thrashing the Germans; they kept reaching ‘the limit of their effort’, and yet our men would keep dying. Something was amiss – the Chief had told me as much himself.

I decided to scout him out, and as I stepped out onto platform four, a train came in and I caught a small shower of condensed steam. Our little girl, Sylvia, had a word for this: a ‘train cloud’. Not a rain cloud, but a train cloud. She was clever with words. The fireman, leaning off the footplate, gave me a grin, which might have been by way of apology. I gave him a wave back anyhow. Footplate men were in reserved occupations, so he could afford to smile.

A man sat on a baggage trolley outside the First Class waiting room. His suit told me he wanted to be in there but wasn’t up to the mark. He too read the Press, and I saw: ‘The War Will Not Make Any Difference to Dale and Dalby’s. They Have Started Their Summer Sale’. The London train was unloading on my right side as I walked. A scruffy porter brought down a tin trunk rather roughly from a First Class carriage, and the man standing in the doorway, topper in hand, called out, ‘Be careful with that piece!’

I knew that porter – name of Bernard Dawson – by reputation. He was from down south. He was evidently fond of a glass of wallop, and his face was crumpled in such a way that you could tell he was a cockney just by looking at him. Also his moustache was famous on York station. It was hardly there. It was as if he’d drunk some brown Windsor soup about a week before and not washed since. The Night Station Master, Samuels, had a campaign against it, said it put off the passengers, that Dawson should either shave or let it grow out. But Dawson paid no mind. He was his own man. That said, he didn’t take against the man with the topper.

‘Sorry, guv,’ he said.

Topper hadn’t heard him, since he was being pestered by his wife in the carriage doorway: ‘But I want a change of magazine’, she was saying.

Ahead, and to the left of me, two engines stood alongside each other at the bay platforms, three and two. One of the North Eastern’s 4-6-0s and one of Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway’s of the same wheel arrangement. A lad looked on, comparing them. I’d seen him about; I believed he was a cleaner in the North Shed, an aspirant driver as I’d once been myself. The first engine – ours – was not over-clean, whereas the other gleamed.

I nodded at the kid, saying, ‘I reckon the Lanky’s shown us up there.’

‘That’s just what I was thinking,’ said the lad, and he coloured up, being a loyal company servant. Beyond him, I saw two gangers or platelayers entering the station from the south end: two blokes who looked like gypsies – dark, and long-haired; they were railwaymen, but dressed anyhow, in old corduroy suits. That was one privilege of the permanent way men; another was that they could enter a station by walking on the tracks. There weren’t too many besides those.

I walked through the ticket gate, with hands in pockets. It was something to be able to saunter in and out of the principal traffic centre of the North without needing a ticket; it was something to be a three pound ten a week man set fair for promotion to inspector. It was something, but not enough. I had been growing bored, and the thought of fighting in a war excited as well as scared me. For much of the past few years, I had lived a quiet life under the iron station arches, like Jonah sleeping in the belly of the whale.

I crossed in front of the bookstall. ‘A Railway Battalion’ I read, on the board advertising that day’s Press. I walked through the booking hall, with the ticket windows on each side. The glass above was cleaner here, there being no engines, and the light was bright blue. This was the clean side of the station – and filled at all times with the echoing voices of the ticket clerks, who had to shout through the ‘pigeon holes’ in the window glass.

‘First Class return?’ I heard a clerk calling out to a man in a dinty bowler. ‘That’ll be four pounds ten and six!’

Dinty bowler turned his head aside, thinking it over.

‘Maybe not, eh?’ the ticket clerk yelled through the glass.

Beyond him, in the hot darkness of the booking office, I saw the ticket office deputy superintendent. I saw him in profile. He was not shouting, but smoking a pipe and staring into the middle distance. He was of an age with me but looked older; a little overweight, freckled, with wavy red hair – and quiet natured, evidently something of an intellect. He’d once said something about Homer, the ancient Greek, and so the ticket clerks all called him ‘Oamer’. I couldn’t recall his right name. Would he be going off to fight? He was the wrong shape for a soldier, and that was fact.

I walked on towards the booking hall doors, which were all propped open for ventilation. Beyond lay the rushing trams and cabs and the high, blue sky of York. I made for the middle doors, and there I coincided with the Chief, who was coming in, but before I could speak to him, the station runner came up. The runners were generally just ‘The Lad’, but the better – or better liked – ones would graduate to a name, and this one was William, and was famed for the speed with which he charged about the place. He handed the Chief an envelope, and the Chief hardly looked at it, but asked William, ‘You’ve seen about the battalion?’

‘Signed up this morning, sir,’ said William, and he was out through the doors. The Chief and William, I recalled, had a special connection, William being in the Riflemen’s League, and an enthusiast for military matters generally, as you could tell by his highly polished brass buttons and his keenness on calling blokes ‘Sir’.

‘Isn’t he too young?’ I asked the Chief.

‘How old is he?’ asked the Chief, in a sort of daze.

‘I believe he’s seventeen,’ I said.

The Chief now glanced down at the envelope he’d been handed. He seemed miles away, as he frequently did.

‘They’ll ask William his age,’ said Chief, tearing open the envelope. ‘If he says he’s seventeen… they’ll ask him again.’

‘But what about his height?’ I said.

‘What about it?’

‘He’s too small. He’s never five foot three.’

‘How do you know?’ said the Chief, looking over the letter. ‘Have you fucking measured him?’ he added, looking up. Which question was immediately followed by another: ‘Can you ride a horse?’

‘Who? Me?’ I said.

‘Aye,’ said the Chief, thoughtful-like, reading again.

What in buggeration was he on about?

‘I’m signing up for the new battalion,’ I said, although I knew my thunder had been stolen by the news that young William had already done it.

The Chief nodded as he lit a new cigar. In the past month he’d given up his little ones and moved to a bigger size – Marcellas, one and six a go – just as though he was celebrating the coming of the war, the return to a man’s normal state of existence. In his own day, the Chief had risen to sergeant major. He’d fought in Africa in the 1880s; chasing the mad Madhi and his still madder dervishes across the Sudan, or being chased by them, it made no bloody difference to the Chief. I figured him in the desert: red headed (he would have had a little more hair in those days), red skinned and red coated, picking off the fuzzywuzzies with his Winchester rifle in 122 Fahrenheit.

‘If you join the Military Mounted Police,’ said the Chief, glancing down at his letter, ‘they’ll teach you to ride a horse.’

‘Is that what the letter’s about, sir?’

(I would ‘sir’ the Chief occasionally.)

‘All railway police are encouraged to go into the Military Police. I’m to report back on the progress of my recruiting,’ the Chief said, tearing the letter clean in two, and folding the pieces into the top pocket of his tunic. I knew that the Chief did not consider the Military Police to be true soldiers.

‘You stick with the railway boys,’ said the Chief. Then, ‘Fancy a pint, lad?’ and I knew that was the nearest I’d come to my congratulations.

We walked out of the station, turned right, and climbed Station Road. On the right was the new station, on the left the old, the connecting tracks running beneath. In the sidings around the old station, the remnants of smoke hung in the heat haze. Some big freight had lately pulled out. A couple of rakes of horse wagons stood unattended, and a long line of wagons of a sort I’d never seen before – a special type of low loader – extended from under the station glass. I saw no soldiers just then.

‘What’s going off there?’ I asked the Chief.

‘Secret, lad,’ said the Chief. But then he added, ‘They loaded five tons of Lee Enfield Mark Threes this morning for immediate dispatch to France.’

I looked behind. Oamer, the ticket office number two, was walking up the road in his steady, thoughtful way, with his coat over his shoulder, and puffing on his pipe, like a steam-powered man.

‘That’s a good sort of rifle, is it?’ I asked the Chief. ‘The Mark Three?’

‘The rifle’s all right,’ said the Chief. ‘It’s the bullet that gives the trouble.’

I thought: yes, it generally is the bullet that gives the trouble, but the Chief was talking about how rimmed cartridges were thought necessary, when in fact they weren’t, and how they would snag somehow. The Germans made do without rimmed cartridges, and consequently their machine guns in particular worked better than ours. I didn’t want to think about German machine guns. But the Chief hadn’t let up by the time we arrived at the Bootham Hotel, which was where all the railway-men went for their afternoon pints.

The Chief led the way into the close beer and smoke smell – faint manure smell into the bargain, for it was cattle market day and the place was ram-packed. The Chief was still talking about bloody bullets: the British Army had been buggering about with ammunition since the Boer War, when what was needed was simplicity and consistency. At the bar stood Dawson, the cockney porter. How had he slipped out of the station ahead of me? The Chief broke off to order the pints, and two rounds of fish paste sandwiches. Along from Dawson at the bar was a train guard – his guard’s cap was on the bar before him, and I looked at his shining black hair, swept back. I knew him for an ingratiating fellow, the oil on his hair seeming to have leaked into his character, and he had an oily first name to match: Oliver. (I couldn’t recall his second.)

‘It’s bloody criminal when you consider what was brewing up with Germany,’ said the Chief.

‘But nobody did know, did they sir?’ as we found two chairs near the dusty fireplace.

‘Course they knew,’ said the Chief, lighting a cigar, ‘I knew, so I’m bloody sure the War Office did.’

‘How did you know war was coming?’ I enquired, at which the Chief fell silent for a space. He was eyeing Dawson, who was after another pint of John Smith’s Best Bitter.

‘You’ve put three away in the last two minutes,’ Don Wolstenholmes, who ran the Bootham, was saying to Dawson. ‘I think you’ve had enough.’

‘I’ve had enough of you,’ said Dawson, and he was loud enough to make the pub go quiet for a moment.

Wolstenholmes did pour another pint for Dawson, and the Chief directed his gaze at the sandwich in his hand. He folded it like a piece of paper and put it into his mouth. Then, while eating, he said, ‘I knew from 1910.’

‘What happened then?’

The Chief folded another sandwich and put it in.

‘The Entente fucking Cordiale, with the fucking French,’ he said, with crumbs and fish paste flying. ‘We wouldn’t be palling up to those buggers if we didn’t know a scrap was coming with the Germans.’

The Chief then took a draw on his cigar. He would always smoke while eating, and while doing most other things. Oliver had come over from the bar, and was standing at the Chief’s shoulder.

‘I don’t blame you police chaps for staying out of it,’ he said, indicating Dawson. ‘He was born drunk, he was. Best thing to do is steer clear.’

The Chief began turning about, with the dazed look on his face, having been rudely diverted, so to speak, from inter national diplomacy. But Oliver had gone by the time the Chief’s manoeuvre was completed, which left him staring directly at the drunken porter, Dawson.

And now the clockwork machine, having been wound up to the fullest, began to work.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Dawson, just as though the Chief’s gold-braided tunic and police insignia wouldn’t have told him; just as if every man on the Company strength didn’t know Chief Inspector Weatherill.

The Chief looked at me, as if expecting me to supply the answer on his behalf, which I did.

‘He’s the head of police at York railway station, as you know very well.’

‘Right enough,’ said Dawson, ‘and otherwise what?’

He was drunker than I thought, and had become meaningless. How had he managed it in that short interval of time since leaving the station?

‘This gentleman’, I said, ‘is second only to the Chief Officer, Fairclough, up at Newcastle, and you would be very well advised -’

I broke off, for I’d noticed that the Chief had put his cigar out even though it was only halfway through. The Chief never put a cigar out when it was only halfway through.

‘Fairclough?’ Dawson was saying. ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’

‘I’ve just told you who he is.’

The Chief had not only put his cigar out, he was also hitching up the sleeves of his tunic.

‘And who are you,’ Dawson was asking me, as the Chief rose from his chair, ‘that you go round sticking up for him?’

‘Would you stop asking everybody who they are?’ said the Chief, in a voice that didn’t sound like him. It sounded like the Chief very far away. ‘You’re a disgrace to your uniform,’ he said, facing Dawson.

The pub was quite silent once again.

‘You can talk,’ said Dawson, for as well as gold braid there was a quantity of fish paste and cigarette ash on the Chief’s tunic. The Chief pushed closer towards him.

‘Eh?’ said the Chief. ‘What do you mean?’

He wanted Dawson to lay a finger on him. Mere abuse did not justify blows. The Railway Police Manual said as much.

Dawson raised his hands, and pointed at the smudge on the Chief’s chest: ‘You’re clarted in bloody…’

He touched the Chief, who frowned at him – not angry but puzzled rather. I was eyeing Dawson’s nose, which was of a good size, and wondering how it would look smashed. Was there a word that might spare it? I barked out ‘Apologise’, but that was too long a word, and the blow, and the cracking sound, came before I could get it fully out. The Chief was getting on in years, but his punch had some special bonus feature. I’d felt it myself on one occasion, and seen its effect on several station loungers. It was spring-loaded somehow; told by its speed rather than its force. Dawson went down.

‘I’ve a mind to charge you,’ the Chief said, at which I made out a voice from the saloon bar throng:

‘… Only you can’t, because this is not company premises.’

It was Oliver, and he was dead right. The Bootham Hotel was not company premises, and that was precisely why it was full of railwaymen, who were not to be seen drinking on railway territory. Dawson could not be charged with assaulting a police officer, because the Chief and I did not count as police officers in that place. We had the ordinary citizen’s power of arrest, and nothing more. The Chief peered into the crowd, and just then seemed a very old man indeed. A commotion at the back of the throng signified the departure of Oliver.

The Chief said to Dawson (who had now risen to his feet, and whose nose was still more or less as was, but a good deal bloodied), ‘You’ll come and see me tomorrow morning in the police office.’

Dawson looked over the Chief’s shoulder, over the heads of the pub blokes, and… he seemed to be gazing through the clear glass of the public bar window. He then fixed his gaze on the Chief, saying, ‘I’m joining the fucking army tomorrow morning.’

That knocked the Chief, at least for a moment.

‘You’d better not be spinning me a line,’ he said. ‘When you sign up, you’ll be given the King’s Shilling. You’ll bring me yours at midday. As proof.’

Dawson, sobered by the punch, quit the Bootham Hotel. The Chief and I took another pint with Don Wolstenholmes, who said he’d had trouble from Dawson before, and would be glad to see the back of him.

At about half past three, I was standing by the high doorstep of the Bootham Hotel, while the Chief took his leave of Wolstenholmes. The heat of the day had hardly abated, and all the pedestrians pushing on down Micklegate looked worn out. Over the road from the Bootham Hotel stood The Lion, a mysterious territory – a pub ignored for some reason by all railwaymen. From above the pub sign – which was a painting of a lion with one paw resting on the York city crest – two Union flags drooped. I looked from them to the window of the Bootham Hotel public bar, tracing the line of Dawson’s gaze of a short while earlier. I didn’t believe he’d meant to enlist until catching sight of that flag. It had struck him as something to say that might shame the Chief. Well, he was in a fix now, for he would have to go through with it.

The Chief had now finished his talk with Wolstenholmes, and we set off back. I said, ‘That was Oliver who spoke out in the pub.’

Silence from the Chief.

‘He was right wasn’t he? About the Bootham being out of our jurisdiction?’

Still the Chief kept silence.

‘I suppose Dawson will bring you his shilling…’

The Chief stopped and turned to me.

‘You’ll bring me yours as well. Then I’ll have shot of the bloody pair of you.’

I ought not to have reminded him about the jurisdiction.

Below us on the right hand side, the old station was packed with army again, and all the sidings were taken up with the special low loaders. It was a relief to regain the cool of the booking hall, where the Chief and I parted. My eye then fell on Constable Scholes.

‘You haven’t seen a bloke with an owl, have you?’ he said, coming up to me. ‘Funny looking sort of bloke with… Well, he’s carrying this owl, so you can’t really mistake him.’

‘The one from before, you mean?’

I watched him realise that I’d overheard his talk with Flower on the subject.

‘Aye,’ he said.

‘I thought he’d cleared off,’ I said.

‘I know but Flower saw him not ten minutes since. I know he means to bring the bloody thing back onto a train. If he did, it would be in express contradiction of my instructions.’

‘It would,’ I said, nodding. ‘Have you signed up for the battalion?’

‘Oh aye,’ he said, ‘… did that at dinner time. Went over with Flower.’

‘Went over where?’

The recruitment office was evidently in the Railway Institute gymnasium. The office had closed at three, so I’d missed my chance for that day, and would have to go tomorrow. Just then Constable Flower marched into the booking hall, signalling at Scholes.

‘The bugger’s out here,’ he was saying, indicating the taxi rank, and meaning the owl man. ‘And I reckon he’s stolen that bloody bird.’

‘Have you got any evidence?’ said Scholes.

‘Course not,’ said Flower, ‘but I’ve seen him before, in the bloody police court. Come on!’

And they went off together. Flower was leading Scholes towards the confrontation with the Owl Man, and I didn’t doubt that he’d dragged him towards the recruiting office as well. Scholes was always led by Flower, but I was impressed by the coolness of the pair of them just then. They might just have signed their very lives away, but here they were, fretting about a bloody owl, while I was thinking about German machine guns, and whether I might come up against the troublesome porter, Dawson, in the railway battalion.

Thorpe-on-Ouse

The sun was low and ragged as I opened the garden gate, and walked towards the wife, my work valise under my arm. She was on the ‘spare’ part of the lawn, where it ran under the three apple trees. Black boots; old blue dress; brown face; hair neither up nor down; trowel in hand. She’d only have been home from her own work at the Women’s Co-Operative Guild half an hour since, but was already hard at it. She was no great hand at housework – well, she had no taste for it – but made an effort with the garden. I walked up and kissed her, saying ‘Hello kidder’ which made her look at me suspiciously.

The wife had a paper bag of bulbs in front of her. She crouched down, took a handful of them – daffodils, we’d bought them in the market the week before – and pitched them under the trees. That was how it was done: you made a ‘run’ to give a natural effect, but it looked like an act of despair.

She said, ‘What’s happened, Jim?’ and I believe she half knew.

I said, ‘Sir Godfrey Glanville Gordon…’

‘That idiot.’

‘You don’t know who he is.’

‘He sounds like an idiot.’

‘He’s the general manager of the North Eastern Railway.’ The wife was gathering up the bulbs, not satisfied with the run. ‘He’s raising a battalion from all the railwaymen, and I mean to sign up tomorrow.’

No reply. She threw the bulbs again – another roll of the dice.

She looked up and said, ‘What are you going to do, Jim? Run the Germans over with trains?’

‘I should think we’ll be a bit like the Royal Engineers.’

‘And is this man Gordon joining up? Will he be fighting alongside you all?’

‘Well he’s got a railway to run. The Chief reckons the commanding officer’s going to be a chap called Colonel Aubrey Butterfield.’

‘Audrey? That’s ridiculous.’

‘Aubrey.’

‘Why, Jim?’ she said, brushing her skirts and rising to her feet. ‘Why are you joining up?’

‘Everyone else is.’

‘Try again, Jim.’

‘All right, to keep the Germans out of wherever it is… Belgium.’

‘It’s a bit late for that.’

‘France, then.’

We walked over our lawn, which was too big, and stood before our house, which was likewise, but rather tumbled-down. At first we’d rented it, but the wife had insisted on buying it, which she managed at a knock-down price, her perpetual aim being to keep up with the other socialist ladies, who were all rich.

Without a word, we stepped through the gate, and onto the narrow road that led to Thorpe. To our right, beyond the hedge, lay the flat field that was used for cricket. Two boys had it all to themselves.

‘That’s the end of the cottage garden,’ the wife said at length.

‘What is?’

‘Your joining up.’ I was supposed to be building a cottage garden, whatever that was. In any event, it must be bordered by a wall of expensive brick. ‘When will you go off?’

‘Oh, not for a couple of weeks, and at first I’ll be close by. We’re to train at Hull… I’ll plant the cottage garden next year.’

I kicked a stone.

‘You’re very sanguine.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’

Well, I knew really, and the fact was that I was not sanguine. The thought of war, even a short one, put me in a considerable state of nerve tension. ‘Anyhow,’ I said. ‘Do you want us to fight them or not? Your lot seem torn on the question.’

By this, I meant all those committees in which the wife was involved by virtue of her part-time job with the Women’s Co-Operative Guild: the movements for women’s suffrage, Labour Party governance, Christian Socialism and whatnot. The committees were all in favour of brotherly (or sisterly) love but in practice argued constantly about whether feminism went with Christianity, violence, protectionism, and now war. But it wasn’t all high principle with the wife. For example, she opposed point blank anything suggested by a certain Mrs Barratt, who was her main rival in York Co-Operation. The wife had several enemies, all women (according to her) of a ‘pushing’ kind. Many of these, it appeared, had come out strongly for pacifism, which inclined the wife rather in favour of the war.

‘After all,’ I said, ‘there’ll be no votes for women, or anyone, if the Germans win.’

By way of reply, she said, ‘Where are we going, Jim?’

‘I thought we were off to collect Harry and Sylvia.’

‘They won’t have had their teas yet.’

The children were being looked after – as always on the wife’s workdays – by Lillian Backhouse, who was the wife of Peter Backhouse, verger of St Andrew’s Church, Thorpe-on-Ouse.

On Thorpe-on-Ouse Main Street, we stood in the middle of the road. All the houses were hidden behind the great hedges. I looked down at the dust on my boots. In the distance, I could hear the rattle of a thresher.

‘Fancy a drink?’ I said to the wife. She nodded, and we stepped into the darkness of the Bay Horse inn, where I bought a pint for myself, and a lemonade for the wife, before returning once more into the light – the garden, which was overgrown, and quite empty. We set down our drinks on a rough wood table with benches alongside. At the foot of the garden was a half-wrecked railway carriage in the green of the North Eastern livery. It had been meant as a sort of summer house, and it had been wrecked before it was brought into this garden, having been in a smash at Knaresborough station. I had often mentioned this to the wife, but she never took it in.

‘It’s just engulfing us all,’ she said with a sigh as I drank my beer.

I went back inside to buy another pint, and when I came out and sat down, the wife’s mood had improved.

‘You must be made an officer, Jim. You might be a captain.’

There was a regular army captain in Thorpe: a Captain Briggs, and at church he sat in his own pew, marked with a little tin badge reading ‘Captain Briggs’.

‘Can’t you be made an officer for showing valour in the field?’ asked the wife.

‘Not if you went to Baytown National School.’

‘What’s the one below captain?’

‘Second lieutenant.’

‘What a mouthful.’

I could tell what she was thinking: it wouldn’t fit on one of those little plaques.

‘I’ve just thought,’ I said, ‘Lillian’s taking them swimming in the river.’ (I meant the children.) ‘Have we to go and watch them?’

‘No,’ said the wife, and she was looking at the old carriage.

‘Do you want to go behind that… thing?’ she said.

And we went behind, where there was a little copse, and no fear of an interruption. There we did what we had done a couple of times before in that spot, although not for years, which is to say that we committed a nuisance or indecency, in the words of the Police Manual.

Ten minutes later, we were out in Main Street, and kicking the stones on the dusty road again. I was thinking of myself as an army officer. Why not? They were making men up from the ranks at a great rate, and how many of the new officers had faced down desperate men on lonely station platforms? How many had hunted up murderers? I had done those things – not easily, and not without fear, but I had done them. And I would look well in an officer’s uniform. What had that junior coat cutter in Brown’s, the best York tailors, said when the wife had forced me to buy a handmade suit? ‘It’s a pleasure to fit you, sir… The greyhound breed.’

But he probably said that to any normal-sized fellow.

Lillian Backhouse was walking towards us with one of her own children in tow, and our two. All the children had wet hair, fiercely brushed in the same way. Harry carried a book, as usual. The wife wanted him at the Grammar school, so that he’d become a good citizen (and rich into the bargain), for which he’d have to be coached up in Latin and Greek, at a longer cost than we could really afford. Lillian smiled at Lydia, who kissed her, saying, ‘Hello love’, immediately afterwards giving a strange glance back at me. It was all to do with not wanting the children back yet.

Harry and Sylvia came rushing up to us, and the wife – her strange mood continuing – said straightaway, ‘Your father’s signed up for the army.’

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘He means to do it tomorrow,’ said the wife.

I looked at Lillian Backhouse, and she didn’t know what to say. Her husband, Peter, was over forty and worn out from digging graves, so I didn’t think he’d be going off. Young Sylvia was looking at me curiously.

‘Do you want to get killed?’

‘I will definitely not get killed,’ I said.

Harry sat down on the edge of the road, and opened his book. I walked up, pulled off his cap, and ruffled his hair, to which he made no reply. I looked down at his page: two cowboys, both firing pistols at Indians on horses. One was instructing the other, ‘Only shoot to “wing”.’

Sylvia walked up, and said to Harry, ‘You should use a blade of grass.’

‘What for?’ he said, for he would speak to her.

‘To mark the place.’

‘I haven’t left off reading yet.’

‘No, but you will do.’

Harry turned the page, and I saw the same number of cowboys, but many more Indians.

‘You’re not going to sit there the whole of your life reading, are you?’ said Sylvia.

Harry made no reply.

‘I think he might very well do,’ Sylvia said to me, then: ‘Dad, will you be going to France?’

‘He must be trained first, idiot,’ said Harry, finally looking up from his book.

‘He’s right,’ I said to Sylvia. ‘Well, he’s not right to call you an idiot, and if he does it again, he’ll get a thick ear. But I’m to go first to Hull.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Sylvia, who suddenly looked near to tears. She was only six, and to my knowledge, she had never been to Hull, nor had any knowledge of it. But it was just the sound of the word that was so disheartening.

Hull: October 1914

Lights-out at had been at ten-fifteen, half an hour since. I looked directly upwards, at the concrete ceiling, feeling like my own son, as I lay worrying, with my three blankets pulled right up about my neck and the book that my own son had sent me, The Count of Monte Cristo, under the blankets beside me. On top of my blankets I’d spread out a copy of the Yorkshire Evening Press for a bit of extra warmth. The largest of the headings read, ‘Allies Continue to Make Steady Progress’. Apparently we’d been making steady progress ever since the show began. By rights we ought to have been in Berlin by now. Only we weren’t.

On the floor above, bags of grain were still kept, and the Number One Warehouse at ‘C’ Wharf of Alexandra Dock, smelt barn-like as a result. On the floor below were drill hall, mess room, reading room, quartermaster’s stores and so on. At the end of my cot, and shuddering at intervals in the sea wind, were mighty double doors, barricaded up to a height of four feet by sandbags. If you pulled away the sandbags, opened those doors and stepped through, you’d drop down onto the dockside and be instantly killed. They were meant for connecting, via gangways, with the decks of ships. But there was only one ship in dock at present, and that was the North Eastern company’s own steamer, the SS Rievaulx Abbey, and it housed the officers of the battalion: the 17th Northumberland Fusiliers; or the Railway Pals.

We’d spent most of the day drilling in squads on the quays and doing Swedish exercises, which was what the army called physical jerks. I ought to have been worn out…

There were fifty cots in my row, which housed ‘E’ Company. I was in E Platoon of ‘E’ Company, so that was easy to remember. We were mainly York blokes in E Platoon. To my right lay Alfred Tinsley, the engine cleaner I’d seen eyeing the Lanky engine on the day the news about the battalion had been circulated. He’d turned eighteen on our arrival at Hull – so he’d lied about his age on enlisting. He’d latched on to me, having recognised me after that brief exchange of ours, and having heard I’d started my railway life on the footplate before giving it up for some mysterious reason.

He was reading, as best he could in the faint light from the few hurricane lamps that burned low between the cots – the Railway Magazine. He was a subscriber, as I was myself, but I knew that Tinsley kept his very carefully, so he could send them home for binding in red cloth with gold lettering. As I looked on, he closed the pages and slid the magazine under his bed, at which a voice called out, rather nastily: ‘No time for the railway hobby now, Tinsley.’ Well, we might have been called ‘The Railway Pals’, but that didn’t mean we were.

I turned the other way and there, separated from me by three snoring porters, was Oliver Butler, head propped on hand, staring my way. He didn’t flinch as I faced him, either, but just carried on staring as if it was his perfect right.

Was it all on account of that business in the Bootham Hotel, when he’d reminded the Chief that he was beyond his jurisdiction? It was Dawson, the cockney porter, who’d been rated by the Chief, not Butler himself, so why was he looking daggers at me? In fact, I had a pretty good idea. We were rivals: we were of about an age; both married men; both kept a clean collar at work; both hoping to be promoted, but keeping quiet about the fact. I was a detective sergeant in civilian life, so I was part of the boss class, and could expect to be promoted before him. Secondly, I had previously been a footplate man, and all train guards have a down on footplate men, since they ride at the business end of the trains.

I turned and lay flat, looking up again, listening to the hundreds of snorers, like a band playing out of time. Dawson himself did not seem to be on the battalion strength; at any rate, I had not yet set eyes on him. He must have dodged the Chief somehow.

‘Fusilier,’ whispered Butler. We were called fusiliers, not privates, and he was addressing me.

I faced him again. His white face had the glow of candlewax; his hair had an oily black shine about it. He looked like a man who considered himself handsome.

‘You’re to go in to see the CO tomorrow,’ he said, and something that turned out to be a smile crept over his face.

‘How do you know?’

It was the first I’d heard of it.

‘It’s on the dining hall notice-board – went up just after supper.’

He was ever watchful of that notice-board, keeping an eye out for all promotions.

‘Why?’ I said.

‘Well, they wouldn’t keep a good chap like you in the ranks.’

From behind him, a very Yorkshire voice, shaky with held-back laughter, said:

‘I’m off now… off to sleep.’

Another, similar voice replied, ‘Are you ’n’ all?’

After an interval, the first one said, ‘I’m going now… I’m on my way.’

A further pause, then the second one said, ‘Have you gone yet?’ and I could hear the first bloke laughing under his blankets, so that the word ‘Aye’ came out with a splutter of laughter.

Oliver Butler held my gaze throughout. The speakers were his two cracked brothers: the identical twins, Andy and Roy, who called each other ‘Andy-lad’ and ‘Roy-boy’ and hardly ever spoke to anyone else. They belonged to the ruffian’s profession of platelayers or track walkers, which meant they’d spent most of their working days out in the fields. In the Butler family, all the effort seemed to have gone into creating the one wonderful creature: Oliver, the gold-braided train guard. The brothers were made of leftovers. They looked like drawings in the funny papers of very tired men: hollow faces, jaws hanging loose, eyes bulging – and their heads were too small. They were tough blokes though, no question.

For the next little while, I shifted about on my thin straw mattress, but no position answered. Oliver Butler had left off staring at me. Why was I being called in? It must be promotion. Every day, you’d see blokes sitting around sewing their new stripes onto their tunics, and trying not to look too chuffed. I would write to the wife as soon as I knew.

At midnight, I heard the distant clocks of central Hull chiming. Shortly after, I heard one bloke a few rows over say to another, very distinctly, ‘Will you stop breathing like that, mate?’ He must have had one of the snorers for a neighbour. The sound of the waves became quite distinct at three or so; at half after four, I heard a hydraulic motor start up in one of the other docks – and, not long after, footsteps on the dormitory floor. It was too much to hope that this was a bloke getting up for a piss, for they were boot steps and not stockinged feet. It was the regimental bugler, and I braced myself for the bloody racket.

The first thing I did was check the notice-board in the dining hall. I was due ‘on the ship’ for my interview with Colonel Aubrey Butterfield, commanding officer of the battalion, directly after dismiss on the square (which was one of the quays of the dock). I would be marched over there by our section commander, Corporal Prendergast, who was in fact Oamer, the easy-going, pipe-smoking number two of the York booking office.

I went to the washrooms for a sluice-down.

All the taps were taken up, mostly with men shaving as best they could under the cold running water. The drill was that you stood behind a man shaving and waited your turn, but the man ahead of me was more boy than man, and so was not shaving but only washing. It was William, the York station runner – surname Harvey, as I had now discovered – and he made Alfred Tinsley, the eighteen-year-old would-be engine driver, look like a veteran. Both were slightly built, and more boys than men, and both had lied about their age when enlisting, but Harvey had lied more, since he’d barely turned seventeen when he walked into the recruitment office. William Harvey looked the part of the young hero as well, with his blue eyes and blond curls, whereas Tinsley was a gawky individual with a face and body he’d not yet grown into. Just then William was talking to his neighbour, who I didn’t know.

‘The Germans are frightened to death – ’ he said, before flattening his curls under the icy water, ‘ – at the sight of a bloody bullet,’ he added, coming up with a gasp. He left off washing, turned to me with a grin, and stepped aside.

‘Lovely day for it, eh… Mr Stringer?’ he said, towelling his hair.

‘For what, son?’ I said, setting about my chin with a none-too-sharp razor. ‘And call me Jim.’

‘The big march,’ he said.

‘I’d forgotten about that.’

The battalion, we had been informed, had secured the use of a very spacious field about four miles off, and we would be marching there for sporting activities. Young William was all in favour of it, red hot with excitement at the thought, he was.

The kid had moved off, and I saw that someone else had come into the position behind me, waiting for the tap… and it was that creeping Jesus Oliver Butler himself. When I’d finished shaving, I turned to him, and said, ‘It’s all yours, mate,’ at which Butler shook his head, saying, ‘I’ve already shaved.’ ‘Then get the fuck out of it,’ I wanted to say, but Butler said, ‘I think we’d better have a word about my brothers… I could see you getting mad at them last night. I bet you’d have liked to come over and lay ’em out.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ I said.

‘Or maybe you didn’t fancy your chances? See, Jim, you might think they’re a pair of simpletons, but what do you think the real business is going to be for us when we get over there in bloody France? Do you think we’re going in with the infantry, Jim? Perhaps you think we’re going to be building railways?’

‘Could you just get to the point?’

‘Right, Jim. Well, the empire is at the crisis of her fate, and she needs some blokes to shovel shit. Have you been down to the QM stores and had a look? There’s eleven hundred shovels there, Jim.’

‘We’re to get rifles as well, you know.’

‘Your most important bit of kit is going to be your shovel and the question is: can you use it? Can you dig an earth rampart, Jim? Can you dig a fucking trench? You’ve no taste for danger, I can see that – nor have I, we’re both intelligent men – and you’ll want to get behind cover in double-quick time. That’s where Andy and Roy come in. You might not see the point of them now, Jim, but put those boys in a field with a shovel in their hands when the machine guns are opening up… Different matter, Jim, very different matter.’ He stuck out his hand, saying, ‘Now look, I’ve said my piece… Shall we be mates?’

I shook his hand – well, it seemed the quickest way of getting shot of him – and he moved off to his breakfast.

I went through to the hall myself a few minutes later. The place was vast, lines stretching to infinity of men sitting on plain forms at long deal tables. At every place was a white plate with a hunk of bread and bacon on it. Trolleys on which sat giant tea urns were wheeled by squads of orderlies, and I did not like to see their thin white suits, because they put me in mind of hospitals. We ordinary soldiers wore civilian clothes: dark trousers and tunic shirts with braces hanging down. We didn’t have uniforms yet, only boots and caps – and there were only two sizes of caps: large and small, whereas most of the blokes, of course, were medium-sized. The officers did have uniforms, and there were plenty of that lot strolling about, for they’d breakfasted earlier, on their boat. I saw our platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Quinn, late of the North Eastern Railway Engineers’ Drawing Office at York. ‘Unfortunately…’ he was saying to a fellow officer. He was a good-looking chap, was Quinn, with a square face, sad brown eyes and a mournful way of talking. He’d been to St Peter’s School, York: the Eton of the bloody North.

In spite of the officers, the dining hall was in uproar. ‘You fellows, you’re always bloody grousing!’ I heard; and someone near me called out, ‘Wang it over, mate!’ at which an empty cup went soaring over my head. I saw young William Harvey. He’d already finished his breakfast: ‘Set me up just nicely, that has!’ he was saying to someone. A few places along from him were constables – now fusiliers – Scholes and Flower. They were talking together, as usual, being about as thick with each other as the weird Butler twins.

I walked further, and saw a place next to Tinsley, the young train watcher. I made to push on, since I knew he’d shoot some railway question at me the moment I sat down. But Tinsley looked up and saw me, and perhaps knew what I was about, so I took the place next to him. He weighed straight in as I set about my bacon and bread: ‘Why did you not continue on the footplate, Mr Stringer?’

‘Well, there’s more money in the police,’ I said, ‘and you keep a clean collar.’

‘But even so,’ said Tinsley.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell the tale. He evidently felt the high-speed life of the engine man to be in every way superior to that of the plodding copper. Without waiting for my answer, Tinsley started in about an engine driver he knew in the York South Shed, who put up ‘the hardest running of any man on the North Eastern Railway’. As he rabbited on, a new bloke sat down over opposite.

It was Dawson, the cockney porter, and he nodded at me, which was a turn-up.

‘Going on all right?’ I said, a bit guardedly.

‘Top hole,’ he said. ‘All right, son?’ he added, nodding at young Tinsley.

I introduced the two of them, but Dawson, being only a porter, hardly existed as far as young Tinsley was concerned. There were all kinds of snobs, and Tinsley was a railway snob.

When not drunk, I realised, Dawson was a different proposition, even looked different. His scrubby little moustache was more of an amusing error rather than anything, and the crumples of his face all added up to good humour. I couldn’t believe this was the same man as had been rated by the Chief in the Bootham Hotel.

‘The Chief talked you into enlisting then?’ I said.

‘What?’ said Dawson, examining his bacon. He looked up. ‘Fact is, I’d been asking myself… Am I more use to the country scrounging for tips in York station or getting killed in France?’ He took a belt of his tea. ‘Crikey,’ he said, and all his face crumples became evident. He was squinting down into his cup. ‘Talk about stewed,’ he said.

‘Mine’s practically water,’ I said.

‘That right?… Versatile, these army cooks.’

He was looking all around the hall, taking it all in.

Someone called out, ‘Silence for the sergeant major!’

A bloke stood on a form at the end of the hall, and announced that, after the after-breakfast parade, there’d be a five-mile route march for the whole company.

‘Nice,’ said Dawson, grinning at me.

This march, the SM announced, was to be in ‘extended order drill’.

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Alfred Tinsley asked me, and a high voice came from across the table.

‘You ought to know.’

It was the other kid, Harvey, and I realised that his had been the voice raised the night before against Tinsley’s reading of the Railway Magazine.

Evidently, the boy and the other boy did not get on.

Five minutes after emerging from the dock, the ‘march at ease’ had sounded, at which everyone began walking more or less normally, most of the blokes smoking at the same time. Young William had called it a lovely day. Well, it might have been a lovely day for Hull. It wasn’t raining much. The town was unfolding in a series of long wide streets, endless tram lines, and hoardings bigger than the houses, many of them advertising B. Cooke and Sons, whoever they were. In the gaps between the hoardings, the grey sea came and went, and I thought back over my interview with Butterfield.

His office was a cabin of the SS Rievaulx Abbey, and behind it were two oil paintings: one showing the crest of the North Eastern Railway Company, the other some Northumberland Fusiliers of a different, older battalion. (They looked to be out in India, or somewhere.) Oamer had marched me in, and my heart sank at Butterfield’s first words.

‘There is at present no vacancy within our regimental police…’

(I had not asked whether there was.)

‘… but I would be happy to recommend that you be transferred to the corps of Military Mounted Police, who are the elite of the force. You would seem an excellent man for the job. I have good reports of you from both your section and platoon commanders and of course you were a policeman in civilian life.’

Of course I was, I thought… but why couldn’t everybody leave off about the military police? It wasn’t proper soldiering as far as I was concerned. I wondered whether the same pressure had been applied to Scholes and Flower.

I said, ‘If it’s all the same, I’d rather stick with the battalion, sir’ and he’d said, ‘It’s all the same to me, Stringer, but it may not be all the same to you.’

When I came out, I said to Oamer, ‘I didn’t seem to get any points for loyalty to the battalion.’

‘But you may do in time,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘When the penny drops that you have been loyal.’

He was perhaps saying that Butterfield was rather dim, which didn’t help me at all – and I had an inkling that the path to promotion would now be blocked as long as I said no to the Military Mounted Police.

For a while, the blokes at the back of the troop had been singing ‘Another Little Drink Wouldn’t Do Us Any Harm’. It was all about the Prime Minister, who liked a drop. Now they switched to ‘Watkins of the Railway Gang’, and this they kept up manfully as we passed a never-ending cemetery, but when another, still bigger cemetery came into view… Well, it seemed to knock the heart out of them, and they gave it up. The only exceptions were those odd boys, the Butler twins, marching a little way ahead of me, who sang to each other a private song: something about ‘a mistake’s been made’ or, as they had it, ‘a mistek’s bin med’, and ‘He’s got no eyes, cos he’s got no head’ and ‘He’s got no feet, cos he’s got no legs’, and this did tickle them.

Our troop was a quarter mile long. The Hull citizenry could see we were soldiers from our ragged formation and the officers riding alongside but, not having any guns, we didn’t command respect, and the looks that came our way… they were half amused, as though people were thinking: ‘You mugs!’ After we’d turned a corner in a somewhat disorganised manner, Alfred Tinsley, the railway-nut, was chattering away alongside me, talking shop.

‘Would you break up the coal while riding?’ he enquired.

‘No time for coal trimming on the road,’ I said. ‘I’d do it beforehand, while my mate’s going round with the oil can.’

‘But wouldn’t you want to supervise your mate as he oiled up?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’d trust him.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Tinsley. ‘It’s a job that has to be done right.’

Presently, we came to a closed level crossing gate, and this threw us out of formation. When we were rearranged, I found myself alongside the bulky figure of Oamer, who was puffing away on his pipe. He was a dark horse, Oamer. He was a good shot, and he’d been in the Territorials, but his red hair was surely longer than regulation army length, and the sweat was prickling on his forehead. He was overweight, and not quite in A1 condition. Young William Harvey was on the other side of him, and our supposed ‘four’ was completed by Scholes. It was odd to see Scholes without his mate, Flower, but Flower was in another ‘four’ and there was nothing either of them could do about it. Scholes’s face looked especially droopy as a result. ‘You seen the North Eastern Railway Journal?’ he asked me. ‘The latest number of it, I mean?’

‘I have not,’ I said.

‘They’ve opened the bloody roll of honour,’ he said, ‘for all those company blokes who’ve gone out already, with other regiments.’

He didn’t half sound depressed about it.

‘You mean for the blokes who’ve won medals?’

‘Some of them have won medals,’ he said. ‘They’re all bloody dead.’

At this, Oamer took his pipe from his mouth.

‘The term roll of honour is used in two senses,’ he said, in his slow, thoughtful way that sat so oddly with the two stripes on his arm. (He ought to have been a major on the Staff, ought Oamer.) ‘Firstly, as a record of certain notable new recruits, transfers and so on – ’

‘How are they notable?’ I cut in.

‘They are notable in the sense that they have come to the attention of the compiler of the roll of honour. Secondly, it is used as a record of men who have – ’

‘ – had their heads blown off in France,’ said Scholes.

‘ – those who have suffered in the cause of liberty in the field.’

I looked sidelong at young William. He had no time for this morbid talk.

‘Why are you called Oamer, Corporal Prendergast?’ he enquired.

I watched Oamer smoke for a while. Every time he put his pipe in his mouth, his red bushy moustache cleaned the stem. It was a highly convenient arrangement. At length, he answered the kid’s question.

‘Oamer is a mispronunciation of Homer, who is apparently taken to be a philosopher by the men of the York ticket office. They believe – and it’s very flattering, I must say – that I am on the philosophical side myself. Hence the name.’

‘Do you mind it, Corporal?’ asked William.

‘Not a bit of it. Homer is the greatest name in epic poetry, a figure comparable with Shakespeare. I am, or was, the deputy superintendent of a ticket office.’

‘But it’s a very big ticket office,’ said William, and Oamer flashed a grin at me over the kid’s head.

We came to the famous field – a recreation ground with a football pitch marked out, and a gang of seagulls parading in the centre circle. As I walked through the gates, I caught sight of our platoon officer, Second Lieutenant Quinn, and he was talking to a fellow officer and uttering, very slowly and deliberately, his favourite word, ‘Unfortunately… It’s not quite big enough.’

The ground was overlooked by hoardings for a shipping company; railway signals and masts lay beyond the boundary fence. An advance party of the battalion, quartered in a bell tent on the touchline, had made the ground ready for us. Among other entertainments was a line of sandbags with a long rope draped over, and a likely-looking sergeant standing by – that would be for tug of war. A track was marked out for the hundred-yard dash; a long sandpit had been dug – for the long jump, of which the army was very fond. But as they split off into their platoons, most of the blokes eyed the gibbet-like arrangement on the far touchline of the football pitch. From this dangled an over-sized scarecrow with a pasteboard disc for a face, and another disc lower down: the heart. Fifty yards in advance of this, neatly aligned on the grass, lay a line of rifles with bayonets fixed.

All the platoon sergeants were shouting (how had the North Eastern Railway thrown up men who could shout like that?) and it seemed we could make for our activity of choice. Whatever you chose, you had twenty minutes at it, and one option was ‘rest easy’ or some such cushy number. You’d sit and smoke in the drizzling rain and watch the others. I thought: the officers’ll look out for who goes there first, then they’ll be down on them for the rest of the bloody war.

The red hot types dashed straight over to the shooting range or the bayonet practice. Other tough nuts went for the tug of war. Young Tinsley was heading that way. Dawson walked past me with shoulders hunched. He was lighting a cigarette, trying to keep the rain off it.

‘Where you off to?’ I called after him.

‘Hazard a guess, mate,’ he said, turning round and grinning.

I explained my theory to him, and he did a sort of mock-frown, making his face very crumpled.

‘Trouble is, mate,’ he said, ‘I’ve already lit up, and it’s a Woodbine. Lovely smoke, is a Woodbine. Here, help yourself.’

And he held out the packet.

If there was one thing I’d learnt so far from the British Army, it was the value of a Woodbine, so I took one, and as Dawson trooped off to ‘Rest Easy’ together with every last slope-shouldered slacker of the battalion, I looked across the recreation ground. Most of the blokes criss-crossing the ground were younger than me, as were most of the officers.

I was beginning to think like the wife: in a pushing sort of way. Why shouldn’t I be sitting up there on a great, grey horse?

I puffed away at the Woodbine for a while, then set off for the shooting range. I was no cracksman, but a decent shot when I had my eye in. As I made off, there came a horrible penetrating scream – a man’s scream, which is the worst kind. It sent all the seagulls rising up from the boundary fence, to where they’d retreated upon our arrival, and it came from the direction of the bayonet practice. The instructor, bent practically double with bayonet to the fore, was charging at the straw figure, and every last man had stood still and was watching. The bayonet went right through the cardboard heart… and the instructor had no end of a job yanking it out again. There didn’t seem to be any established procedure for pulling a bayonet out of a man, and there was some laughter at this but not much, because most of the blokes had been put in mind of France all of a sudden.

When he’d recovered his weapon, the instructor steadied the dummy, and walked back to the line of blokes waiting their turn. First in line was the smallest and youngest man in the battalion, hardly a man at all: William. What kind of scream would he produce? He was handed his rifle, and I watched as he readied himself for his rush at the swinging scarecrow. But William had seen something amiss in the way the bayonet was fixed. With a crowd of blokes holding rifles behind him, and agitating at him to get on with it, he tried to shove the thing more firmly into its housing, which he did by directly grasping the blade. A sort of dismayed groan came from the blokes behind him; the man running the show dashed over to him, and the shout went up for medical orderlies. The kid was looking down at his hand, unable to credit the size of the gash he’d made there.

‘Oh mother,’ said a voice behind me. It was one of the Butler twins. ‘I’ll bet he’s sore,’ said the other one.

‘I’ll bet he’s sore as owt,’ said the first, and they turned and grinned at each other.

Behind them stood their older brother. Most of the battalion had seen what had happened to the kid, but Oliver Butler wasn’t looking at the casualty. He was, as usual, eyeing me.

That evening, half of the battalion – A and B companies – had been given leave to go off into the town. Why them? The question was not to be asked. We were all at the mercy of the orderly corporals and the notices they pinned up in the dining hall. Some A and B blokes had been too tired after the march to take advantage, but most had gone, and come eight o’clock the reading room was practically deserted. A couple of blokes I didn’t know played a quiet game of cards, and the Butler twins sat opposite each other. They weren’t reading of course – I doubted they could. One – it might’ve been Andy – took out a Woodbine for himself, then passed one to Roy (if it was he).

Roy said, ‘Fine style, Andy-lad,’ then struck a match.

His brother, taking the light, said ‘Fine style, Roy-boy,’ in return.

They always did that when they smoked together. A little further along sat young William Harvey, reading with a bandaged hand. He looked particularly small, just then, the reading room being massive, like all the others. The place was filled with the sound of the droning wind, and the electroliers swung in time with the surging of the sea.

William sat on one chair with his feet on another, and a magazine across his lap. When he saw me, he took his feet down, just as though I did have a stripe on my arm.

‘How’s your hand, son?’ I said, wondering whether they’d had to sew it, and he just nodded, evidently not over the shock yet. His bandage was stained with iodine. He stood up and made towards the door, moving at about half his usual pace. I walked over to where he’d been sitting, and I saw that it was the latest number of the North Eastern Railway Journal that he’d been reading. This was now almost entirely given over to the war, and had very little about the ordinary workings of the railway. You’d think the editors had been waiting all along for an excuse to drop railway subjects. Young William had evidently been reading the roll of honour, as mentioned on the march by Scholes, for he’d left the magazine open at that page. I picked it up, and read of the glorious deaths of railwaymen who’d gone to France at the earliest opportunity, prior to the formation of the battalion. Private Willetts, a labourer at Darlington Locomotive Works… a bullet had gone through his cap. Well, it hadn’t only gone through his cap. There’d been the small matter of his head as well. But in the case of a Private Harrison, a shunter at York, the writer had written more plainly. Harrison had been ‘blown up at Le Cateau’. But that wasn’t quite the end of it. They’d amputated both legs… but he’d pegged out anyway. There was in addition a photographic portrait of a bloke who’d stopped something at Mons. He was reported ‘as well as could be expected’, but I doubted that he still looked as he did in the portrait.

Young William was watching me from a little way in advance of the doorway. He turned and made for the door as I looked up. The moving electroliers and the oil lamps acted in concert to make his shadow rise and fall as he walked. That, at least, was big.

Young William Harvey’s hand did mend, and it might be that over the endless months of bull his chest expanded to the required thirty-four inches. He got back his martial spirit, or appeared to, and the blokes would ask him what he meant to do to Brother Fritz just to hear such bloodthirsty language coming out of such an angelic face – and of course with him, Britain was always ‘Blighty’.

His jingoism put some of the blokes’ backs up, but I didn’t mind him, and he seemed to have quite taken to me. One evening he came up to me and asked me how I polished my cap badge. He seemed a bit shocked when I said it hadn’t occurred to me to polish it at all. For something to say, I told him I’d seen Oamer going at his with some sort of white paste.

‘That’s toothpaste, Mr Stringer,’ said Harvey, who never would call me Jim. ‘Toothpaste is for teeth. Best thing is to use a dab of vinegar.’

‘You sure, son?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to smell like a pickled onion.’

‘Vinegar,’ he said, winking at me, ‘it’s the army way.’

He’d had this from his family, I believed. He had a number of relations who’d been in the colours before the war, and I’d heard that his father – currently working as a barman in the York Station Hotel – had won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in some long forgotten Empire Campaign.

We spent half of every day training, half of it drilling, and it got so you’d actually think about standing. I’d be out in Hull, waiting for a tram, and I’d be thinking: now I’m standing at ease; now I’m standing easy. The idea was that we would all move as one mechanism, but this never quite came about. We remained individuals, and most of us more railwayman than soldier. I kept cases on those particular individuals I have already mentioned, because we were all from York, and all in the same company. Anyhow these blokes interested me, and some of them I liked.

Oamer was about the best-liked NCO in the battalion, and the only mystery was why he’d not become an officer. I supposed he was seen as an oddity with his pipe, his thoughtful remarks, his rather too comfortable appearance. I recall one night in the dormitory watching him slowly applying foot powder while turning the pages of a difficult-looking book. He wrote a letter to somebody every night, and no man knew who. It did cross my mind that he might be queer.

My particular pal was Bernie Dawson (as I came to know him). His shadowy moustache survived the hatred of two sergeants and one sergeant major. He soon got a name for liking a drop of ale, and I believe he was involved in a bit of a barney in one of the Hull pubs, but I never saw any repeat of the Bootham Hotel sort of carry-on. He went everywhere with scuffed boots and – when we got our uniforms – pocket flaps undone, but he was amusing company.

My other mate was young Alfred Tinsley. Off duty, he and I would go and look at the engines at Hull Paragon station, and he would write down the numbers while telling me all about this footplate god of his – the York South Shed man – whose name, I learnt, was Tom Shaw. I’d never heard of Tom Shaw, and could scarcely credit his existence, since Tinsley only ever spoke to me about him, and the bloke seemed so perfect in all respects. But I was happy to go along with the lad’s railway talk. (The footplate had been my original calling, and late at night in the dormitory, I would imagine myself driving engines for the army in France, and somehow saving the day by putting up some hard running of my own.)

Tinsley had a down on Harvey, who, he complained, was forever boasting of his army connections. Other blokes said the same, but I only ever saw the enthusiasm of the boy scout in Harvey; I found him amusing more than anything, and it counted for something with me that the Chief had liked him.

In February of 1915 I was called in again to see Butterfield, and he was still worrying away at the question of why I would not join the military police. At the end of our interview, he sat back, and said, ‘I consider your decision unwise’, and so there it was in the open: I could not hope for promotion on his watch, having twice defied his wishes. Scholes and Flower had come under the same sort of pressure, and Flower had cracked. His departure for the Military Mounted Police (where he’d be made straight up to corporal) left Scholes glooming about on his own, or sitting on the wall in the dock playing his flute.

When Oliver Butler heard of Flower’s move, he approached me in the reading room, saying, ‘He hasn’t half the brains you have’, which might possibly have been his genuine opinion.

I said. ‘The army police operate at the back and that’s no good for me. I want to have a slap at Fritz.’

‘Where d’you get that talk from?’ he said.

‘William,’ I said, turning the pages of Punch. ‘He might be ten years old, but he’s got some good lines.’

‘Thing is,’ Oliver said, ‘some of the blokes do feel uncomfortable having coppers in the ranks. That’s one reason Butterfield wants rid of you.’

‘Well, it’s hard bloody lines, isn’t it?’

But what he’d said made sense; much the same had occurred to me.

In April 1915, we were told we’d had the great honour of being made a Pioneer Battalion. Pioneers were a kind of sappers: shit shovellers as Oliver Butler bitterly had it; and we did dig a lot of practice trenches, and Andy and Roy Butler could each shift more earth than any three men, of which Oliver Butler was half proud and half ashamed. He himself – being ambitious, for all his sarcastic tone – aimed at the more technical side of pioneering, and had put in for a badge in field telephone operation.

It was known that pioneering might lead to railway construction at the front, but I couldn’t see how it would lead to railway operation, which seemed all the province of the Railway Operating Division, a part of the Royal Engineers.

Anyhow, trenches were the thing mainly required. The Yorkshire Evening Press had stopped talking of ‘steady progress’; it was more a matter of our boys having completely ‘mastered’ whatever was the latest German offensive. The other lot were making the running, in other words. Sometimes the paper would admit that the Germans had attacked ‘in force’, but then we would make ‘a fine recovery’. A small line might be ‘temporarily lost’. How did the bloody Yorkshire Evening Press know the loss was only temporary? Did they have the ability to see the future? You stopped believing it all. You’d look at the stuff not touching on the war – ‘To-Day’s Racing’ or ‘Schoolboy Thieves Arrested’ – and wonder if that was all invented as well.

The fact that my path to promotion was blocked also depressed me, especially since the wife – on my leaves and in her letters – was forever asking when I was going to be made up. I banked on the early departure of Butterfield, for the officers did come and go at a hell of a rate. Second Lieutenant Quinn, for instance, was transferred to another regiment at the start of 1915, so that we had a different company commander during our first three billeting stints (six weeks at a time on the Yorkshire Moors, at Catterick and on Salisbury Plain), but in late summer he came back as Captain Quinn. He remained ever likely to say the word ‘Unfortunately’, and the men played a kind of game. You’d get points for overhearing him coming out with it. I ‘bagged’ one utterance. Quinn was coming off the square with another officer, and I heard him say, ‘Unfortunately we’ve had some rather bad luck.’ Well, I thought, bad luck generally is unfortunate, is it not? I speculated that he might have been talking about the whole situation on the Western Front, which now seemed one giant graveyard for British soldiers.

In the second half of 1915, we all expected our ‘order for the front’ every day, and even the most obviously fretful men – such as Scholes – wanted to get out there just so the waiting would be over. When, in late October, Oamer strolled up to me in the washroom and said, ‘Confidentially, old man, we’re out of here next week’, I thought we were for France at last, but he meant only another billeting stint, this one at Spurn Head.

But Spurn Head would prove to be different. Everything that happened to us in France would be in direct consequence of events on that weird peninsula.

Spurn: November 1915

Spurn Head is about three miles long and in places not more than fifty yards across. On any map of Britain, they have a job making it thin enough without just drawing a single line. On one side is the North Sea, which (what with one thing and another) the army had stopped calling ‘the German Sea’; on the other is the Humber Estuary. But what you saw if you stood on Spurn was just flat, shining sea, and if any ships happened to be on it, then they looked to be much higher than you were. At the northern end of Spurn stood the village of Kilnsea, and on the beach hard by, a huge, elevated bonfire burned day and night – a beacon for ships in a great iron goblet. It would warm you up from fifty yards off, that brute would.

The German navy had lately opened up with its twelve-inch guns on Scarborough, Whitby and the Hartlepools, and the army brass was now attempting to make safe the entire east coast. Accordingly, the Royal Engineers were going to secure Spurn Head, and so the Humber Estuary. This meant constructing gun batteries, which were to be linked with a standard-gauge military railway running along Spurn.

We went there as a section, detachment or working party, I’m not sure which. Our section commander (if that’s what we were) was Corporal Prendergast, in other words Oamer. As far as I was concerned we were just a splinter of ‘E’ Platoon, various bits of which had been fired from Alexandra Dock in the direction of the east coast, all under the overall command of Captain Quinn.

At Hull we’d entrained for a spot called Patrington, which is the nearest railhead to Spurn, and which proudly stands in the centre of a network of mud roads. There, in late afternoon, we’d boarded two open wagonettes, and as these bumped their way east we sat first in greatcoats, then greatcoats and horse blankets – for the sea wind is murder in that territory. We saw the beacon from five miles off, growing brighter and bigger as the dusk fell.

Captain Quinn was in the first wagonette with Oamer, the two kids and one of the Butler twins: Andy. I was in the second with Dawson, Scholes, Oliver Butler and Roy Butler. At Patrington station, Oamer had deliberately separated the twins, and this, I knew, was done at the prompting of Quinn, who thought it bad for morale that they should be so thick with one another and hardly speak to anyone else.

I turned to Roy:

‘What do you reckon’s in store for us here, then?’

I knew I’d have to wait for my answer, and the wagonette jolted on for a good hundred yards more before he began, ‘Should think…’

‘What?’

‘Bull,’ he said, and it was something to get even that out of him.

‘But what kind of work?’ I asked Roy, who was gazing away over the fields towards the beacon.

Oliver Butler, who always watched closely my attempts to draw out either of his brothers, eyed me for a space after I’d given up. Then he said, ‘Pick and shovel stunt – ten to one.’ He had a copy of the Press on his lap. He was a big reader of that paper for some reason – had it on subscription whereas the rest of us would just pick up the copies we saw lying about. I read, ‘York Officer’s Big Pike’. It seemed to me that the paper was starting to lay off the actual fighting, ever since the battle of Loos, the month before, which had been the first to involve the New Armies, the Kitchener boys I mean, sorts like us.

Word was, it had been a calamity. We’d used poison gas shells which meant the brass was getting desperate and that the war reports would no longer be able to call this a ‘perfidious German method of warfare’.

To my right sat Scholes, who’d been silent since Hull. In his gloved hand, he held a sheaf of papers with music on them. He could read music just like words. You’d see him singing to himself as he did it. The week before, he and a shunter from Leeds who played the piano had given a concert in the reading room at Alexandra Dock, and I’d gone along just in case nobody else did. I was quite done in, so it had put me to sleep, but in a pleasant sort of way.

Bernie Dawson was sitting over opposite, alongside Oliver Butler. He’d been fishing about in his pack for a while, and now produced a canteen and a metal cup. He poured himself a tea, and drank it down fast; he poured another and offered it first to me. I took a swig, and Roy Butler most unexpectedly spoke up again.

‘Owt like?’ he said, meaning he wanted a belt of it for himself.

I handed him the cup and he downed it in a gulp.

The clouds in this place were like nothing I’d seen – like great black arrows swooping in from the sea. Presently, Roy Butler remembered about the cup, and passed it back to Dawson with a nod.

‘Anytime, mate,’ said Dawson, restoring the cup to his pack. He sat back in the bouncing wagonette, and pulled his blanket more tightly around him. ‘Talk about a hole,’ he said, taking in the strange beauty all around. Roy Butler was lighting a cigarette. He smoked more than his twin brother, I believed, and even though he usually appeared equally nerveless, he was more inclined to do so at anxious moments, so I had perhaps got him worried with my questions about our Spurn duty. I credited him with being brighter than his brother, and I fancied that, if kept apart from him for long enough, he would eventually become normal.

‘All these fields,’ Dawson said to Oliver Butler, ‘… could be just the place for some field telephones. You might be mucking in with the RE boys, Ollie.’

‘We’ll be digging their bloody latrines,’ said Butler. ‘You just wait.’

‘Here,’ said Dawson, ‘where are we billeted?’

‘At a farm, according to Oamer,’ I said.

Suddenly leaning forward, Dawson enquired, ‘At a farmhouse, I hope he said.’

Well, the place was Cobble Farm. Quinn was in the farmhouse, the rest of us in the barn. For the first two weeks I never saw the farmer, name of Lowther, but sometimes at five in the morning I would hear the roar of a great petrol-driven tractor. The grub was served out to us from the back door of the farmhouse by Mrs Lowther, who was friendly enough, but wouldn’t have the rank and file in her house. There were no animals to be seen, only half a dozen cats, and the whole place was clarted with wet mud – shone with it when there was any light in the sky, which there was for about three hours a day.

On the first morning, Quinn paraded us in the farmyard; then he started in on a little speech, with many a hesitation, and a glance towards the wide farmyard gate and the dead straight mud road stretching away to the beacon, burning even then at eleven o’clock on a rainy Tuesday morning like an advertisement for hell. Our time in the Alexandra Dock, Quinn said, had made soldiers of us. We may not realise it, but he could see that we were very different men. The work we were about to commence was of vital importance, but he hoped we would also enjoy and learn from it. It would be hard work, and he’d warned Mrs Lowther that it would put an edge on our appetites. (At this he grinned at us all, which meant he had told a joke.) He gave another glance over to the gate, and the smile gradually disappeared. I knew what was coming:

‘Unfortunately…’ said Captain Quinn, in his sad, dreamy sort of way.

He was gazing towards the mud road, and this time we all sneaked a look in that direction, for a motor van had appeared on the horizon. At this Quinn’s smile, and power of speech, returned. With the van coming on quickly, he was talking about how the work in prospect would afford considerable scope for the display of initiative. ‘… And I am pleased to say’, he continued, as an orderly climbed out of the van to open farm gates, ‘that the shovels do now seem to have arrived.’

We would be constructing defensive earthworks in a vast field lying between Kilnsea and the beginning of the Spurn peninsula. The plans were in a piece of paper held in Captain Quinn’s leather-gloved hands, but the paper and the field would prove to be two different matters.

The trouble (Oliver Butler had been dead right) was that for all our training, none of us could dig properly except for Roy-boy and Andy-lad.

I recall the end of our second week in that slimy field…

Fusilier Scholes – perhaps blown down by the roaring wind, or perhaps having simply missed his footing in the ooze – had lately fallen over, and Captain Quinn had watched him do it.

‘After a very few days, Prendergast,’ I overheard him saying to Oamer, ‘I anticipate that things will be running like clockwork.’

As Scholes struggled to his feet, young William Harvey, trying to shake a clod of earth off his shovel, nearly brained young Alfred Tinsley, who shaped to give him a belt in return. They’d been needling each other for the past hour. Tinsley, as usual, had been talking trains, and William had said, ‘The war’s the thing now, not railways. Personally, I’m glad to be clear of them.’

Captain Quinn watched Oamer separate the pair. Then it was my turn to take a spill into the ditch we were accidentally making (for all the water in the field seemed to be running rapidly into our trench). Quinn climbed onto the horse with which he’d been equipped, saying to Oamer, ‘In summer, Corporal, conditions here would have been very nearly ideal.’

After he’d departed, Oamer asked Andy and Roy Butler to give us all a demonstration of digging, which meant in practice that they gave each other a demonstration of digging. The first thing that told you they knew their way around a shovel was that they called it a blade.

‘Tha needs ter clean t’blade,’ Roy said to Andy.

‘Aye?’ said Andy, taking the role of the apprentice, and giggling back at Roy, ‘Wha’ever fower?’

Roy then touched Andy on the shoulder, and half whispered, ‘Ask me ’ow.’

‘’Ow,’ said Andy. ‘Ow do I clean it?’

Roy produced a wooden wedge from his tunic pocket, holding it up like a magician, which set them both laughing fit to bust. Oamer was looking at me and shaking his head, and Oliver Butler, who’d seen him do it, was scowling at both of us. But the twins were better at teaching digging than the army instructors. The main thing was to pat down the sides of the hole as you dug. Roy and Andy made a big thing of this, and turned it into a singing jig, which they performed while slapping with their shovels the sides of the trench. As far as I could make sense of the words, they ran along these lines:

‘Batter ’em, flatten ’em,

Flatter ’em, splatter ’em,

Don’t leave yer ’ole

’Til yer stuff’s packed flatter ’n that ’n’ mum.’

(Because as well as calling shovels ‘blades’, they called earth ‘stuff’.)

The pressing question, it seemed to me, was: Are this pair actually dangerous? From the look on the face of William Harvey, he thought so, and I knew he’d spoken to Oamer about sleeping away from them in the barn.

Apart from digging, we were told off in pairs for sentry-go. A control point was made on the road leading onto Spurn consisting of three oil drums, two planks of wood and a charcoal brazier. Barbed wire was laid in the fields to either side. In this and the digging, we alternated with the other section from the battalion: we were Shift A, they were Shift B. Most of the traffic that came by was to help with the building of the railway along Spurn, construction of which had started from the opposite end – from the tip, Spurn Point.

The password was ‘Skeleton’.

One morning, when I was doubled-up with Scholes, we were approached by a party of schoolkids from the villages of Kilnsea and its neighbour, Easington.

‘Password,’ said Scholes.

They didn’t know it.

‘Look here,’ I said to the kid in the lead, ‘is there a school on Spurn?’ (For we’d been told nothing about it.)

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t be going there.’

I looked at Scholes, and he was standing with his eyes closed, as if he could transport himself elsewhere by so-doing. Scholes shouldn’t have been a policeman, and he certainly wasn’t cut out for a soldier. He was plum scared of going to France, I knew. He spent most of his guard turns staring out to the high ships and playing mournful tunes on the penny whistle that he’d brought with him in lieu of his flute. I let the kids through – if they were German spies, I would take the knock.

In fact, there was a school on Spurn, as we discovered when the master came along five minutes after. When that bloke had gone through, Scholes looked at the perfectly clear blue sky and said, ‘A storm’s due.’ He’d heard this from one of the B Shift men, who’d had it from the farmer they lodged with. Scholes then asked me what I made of Oliver Butler.

‘Mmm… Tricky customer,’ I said.

‘Fascinated by you, he is. Always plugging me for particulars. What were you like in the police office? Were you up to the mark as a plain clothes man?’

‘Snoopy bugger,’ I said.

‘And Dawson,’ said Scholes, ‘what about him?’

I said I considered him a thoroughly white bloke.

Scholes said, ‘It’s a bit weird being at close quarters with him. In York, I pulled him in twice.’

I asked ‘What for?’ but I already knew.

‘Drunk and Incapable.’

‘On the station?’

‘Aye.’

‘Has he ever mentioned it?’

‘It’s never come up, no. It’s as if he’s blotted it out of his memory.’

‘Did he go away?’ I asked, because you might get a week in a gaol for second time Drunk and Incapable.

‘Fined thirty shillings the first time, forty shillings the next. The second time I had to blow the whistle for Fowler.’

‘Resisted, did he?’

‘Just a bit of lip, really. Not much more than that. Flower wanted him charged with assault, but I talked him round. Didn’t seem worth getting the bloke lagged.’

Any other grade of railwayman would have been stood down for drunkenness, but the porters were all boozy, and known to be so. I reminded Scholes of the run-in the Chief and I had had with Dawson in the Bootham Hotel, and he said, ‘Did you know he’s been warned off half the pubs in York?’

‘Well,’ I said, warming my hands at the brazier, ‘it’s a good thing he doesn’t hold a grudge.’

‘But how do we know he doesn’t?’ said Scholes.

That evening, we were in our makeshift cribs in the barn, one oil lamp to every two men. Scholes was playing his whistle in the farmyard outside in the dark. He’d said the smoke from the brazier made his eyes smart, at which Bernie Dawson had muttered to me, ‘You know, I don’t think he’s going to like the Western Front very much.’

We’d been warned by Oamer to expect news of a duty that would take us onto the actual peninsula for the first time. Meanwhile we were killing time, and listening to Scholes.

Young Alfred Tinsley, the next bloke along from me, was sucking a peppermint and reading the Railway Magazine – lost in it, he was. On the cover, I read ‘Don’t forget your friend in the services. Buy him a Railway Magazine!’ I hadn’t had that particular number yet. It would probably be waiting for me at Hull, the wife having sent it on from Thorpe. I was just then trying to write to the wife. In my last letter I told her that I was unable to disclose our location, and she’d written back saying, ‘Would it be Kilnsea, East Yorks? Because that’s what the postmark says.’ I was now writing that it might be and it might not be, but she should keep in mind that incoming letters were soon to be read by officers as well as outgoing.

‘Who are you writing to?’ asked Oliver Butler.

‘Mind your own fucking business,’ I said.

‘Everywhere one goes, the spirit of merry badinage in the air,’ said Oamer, who’d just stepped into the barn. (Scholes had also come in behind him.)

‘What’s the special duty, Corporal?’ came the voice of young William, who had his crib on the other side of wooden partition, next to Oamer’s – his bolthole from the twins.

‘Bide,’ said Oamer.

This was the nearest he ever came to saying ‘Shut up’, and he was eyeing the twins, who hadn’t yet left off with their secret whisperings. Presently, Oamer said, ‘Be it known by all…’ which was his way of beginning an announcement. He then told us that the Spurn military railway very nearly was half completed.

‘Oh good-o,’ said Oliver Butler.

According to Oamer, it now ran from a railway pier at the tip of the peninsula to a spot somewhere in the middle. Tomorrow, we were to march to that spot, and there we’d board the train and be conveyed to the pier.

‘That’s a bit of all right,’ said Alfred Tinsley, because here was a railway for him to look at.

‘Why are we going to the railway pier, Corporal?’ asked Oliver Butler.

‘You are to unload a ship,’ said Oamer, ‘… quite a small ship, you will be pleased to hear.’

Digesting this news, we all turned in for the night, and every lamp in the barn was soon extinguished except the one from Oamer’s (and William’s) side of the petition, which continued to burn low. Oamer would no doubt be writing to… well, whoever he wrote to.

I couldn’t get off to sleep. I turned on my side; I heard a sort of grunt from the direction of Oamer, and then the noise hit. It did hit as well; the whole barn rocked, and every man instantly sat up. Every man was talking as well, but I couldn’t make out a word; soft muffles seemed to fall from every mouth, even though I knew everyone was shouting. The Chief had once told me that a bloke in the Riflemen’s Leagues at York had fired one of the big bore ones indoors without ear defenders. He burst both his ear drums, and the way he knew about it was that he couldn’t hear the mechanism when he re-loaded the gun, and then he felt a tickling above his collar – the blood running down from his ears.

I put my hand up to my own neck, and there was no blood, but still my hearing wasn’t right. After a space, the word being repeatedly spoken by Oamer, ‘Bide… bide!’ became clear, but it was no use against the shouting of the others, and one shout I heard above all: ‘It’s the bloody war,’ said Scholes, ‘it’s come here… it’s bloody come here.’ Then the farmer came into the barn dressed in his night shirt with an Ulster coat slung over the top but no bloody trousers or underclothes on, so his privates were in plain view. In a right state, he was. Evidently half the windows in his house had smashed.

‘What in hell’s name’s going on here?’ he shouted at Oamer, but he’d been followed in by Captain Quinn, who addressed us while buttoning up his tunic. He would be riding down to the peninsula to make sure, but he believed that the Royal Engineers had fired one of their 9.2-inch guns – ‘almost certainly not in anger’, but merely to test it.

‘Well, I’d say it was working,’ muttered Dawson.

‘Now if I’m wrong over this,’ Quinn continued, ‘and this is in fact a German battle group firing on us, then that puts a rather different complexion on matters…’ We could rest assured he would be telephoning through to battalion headquarters from the Spurn redoubt directly.

He wheeled about and was gone, at which all eyes were fixed on Young William. He was sitting on the dusty flags and fighting for breath, just as though he’d run a mile at full pelt. Oamer made towards him, and the kid brushed him off, saying in an under-breath something like, ‘Will you leave go of me?’ in a way that could have landed him in very hot water indeed, if our corporal had been a different sort of person.

The Spurn railway terminated hard by a wooden hut that served as an officers’ mess for the Royal Engineers. Someone had chalked a message on the bare wood of the shed door: ‘Tom, Telephone down to Henry. Regards, Max’, and that’s the kind of set-up it was. The officers were easy-going blokes, more university professors than soldiers; they seemed to run Spurn like their own gentlemen’s club.

The mess, and the temporary terminus, were bang in the middle of Spurn, in a part of it called the Narrows. There was beach at not more than thirty yards’ distance on either side of the track. Just then the sea did not threaten the track, but I didn’t fancy its chances in the event of any storm, such as that predicted by Scholes.

It was, in fact, a beautiful early-afternoon, the sea shining, two sailing ships off Spurn, both definitely not German destroyers. The day suited the cheery features of a certain Captain Leo Tate, who stood on the new-laid track, and addressed us as we sat on a sand dune. Our whole group was present save William, who’d been detailed to bicycle between the cottages and the farms around Kilnsea and Easington, giving out a schedule of the times when the Spurn gun would be tested again. He would then return to Cobble Farm in the evening.

Captain Leo Tate was a little older than me – somewhere in the middle thirties. He told us he’d been delighted to hear we’d been given this detail because he was from York himself. Well, he certainly didn’t sound it. He was also a good friend of our own Captain Quinn’s, both of them having been at St Peter’s School, the Eton of the North. As he addressed us, Tate seemed fascinated by the sight of the twins, and kept sneaking sly looks at them.

‘Did you know Spurn is eroding at the rate of a yard every year?’ he began.

‘Yes,’ I heard someone say. (Probably Oliver Butler.)

Tate told us something of what he and his fellows had been about, adding that we would shortly see for ourselves. After talking for five minutes, he asked if we had any questions.

‘What class of engines do you run on the railway, sir?’

It was Alfred Tinsley, of course.

‘Well, you see our modest engine shed,’ Quinn said, pointing to what looked like a glorified beach hut at the end of a siding a hundred yards distant. Steam was leaking from it, and more from the walls than the chimney. ‘At present, it houses just the one locomotive,’ Tate was saying. ‘A Hudswell-Clarke standard, and I don’t need to tell you men the specifications.’

Dawson leant into me, and said, ‘He does need to tell me.’

‘Outside cylinder 0-4-0 saddle tank,’ I said, and Quinn heard and pointed at me, ‘Quite right, there. Are you an engine man, fusilier?’

‘I’m a railway policeman sir,’ I said. ‘Detective division.’

But Captain Leo Tate didn’t seem to have heard me. He was looking along the line, with a big grin spreading over his features; then there came a gasp from Alfred Tinsley. Something was skimming towards us at a hell of a lick. It was two men sitting in something between a railway wagon and a yacht – for it was propelled by sails.

‘What is it?’ breathed Tinsley, and he was looking the question directly at Tate, even though a private soldier is not supposed to address an officer, but must wait until spoken to.

‘Pump trolley converted by the addition of a lug sail,’ said Tate, beaming, ‘and these chaps are on a broad reach.’

Even he seemed amazed by the speed of it. When the thing came close it looked jerry-built, ridiculous, but you couldn’t help liking the looks of the two blokes who stepped off it – two junior officers in the Tate mould: a pair of overgrown boy scouts. They put their funny little bug in a siding, and at that instant, the barking of steam was heard from the little engine shed, and the Hudswell-Clarke rolled out. ‘Anyone fancy a footplate ride?’ enquired Tate. Alfred Tinsley’s hand was up directly. Mine would’ve been too, had I not been on my dignity. There were no other takers, but Tate pointed to me, asking, ‘How about our railway policeman?’

The engine – which could have done with a clean – was a Standard 14, to be exact, that maid of all work, often to be seen at pit head and factory. It was still in North Eastern Railway colours, and had kept its name: Lord Mayor. We watched it collect an open wagon and take a drink from a water siding. Then we climbed up. It was a tight squeeze on the footplate, since Tate evidently proposed riding there too. The rest of the party climbed onto the open wagon, and all our packs and rifles were slung up there as well. We set off, with our smoke and steam darting crazily in the blustery wind that was getting up. But the sky remained a beautiful pale blue, with just two or three white clouds turning over and over.

‘You can see half the world from here,’ said our driver, a sergeant from his uniform, and evidently a poetic one. Captain Tate, not so poetic, said, ‘Strictly speaking, Spurn is what’s called a Sand Spit…’ and started on another geography lesson. When he’d finished, I asked the sergeant whether the regulator gave gyp, since he did seem to have to wrestle with it. Tate, who’d learnt my name by now, said, ‘You take a close interest for a railway policeman, Stringer.’ I explained that I’d been trained up as a fireman, at which our own fireman stepped aside without a word, and handed me the shovel. I put a bit on, and it did go more or less where I’d aimed it. As Spurn Point was approached, I’d graduated to the regulator, and Alfred Tinsley was trying his hand with the shovel. Well, Lord Mayor was a pretty good steamer, and we were both practically wriggling with happiness just then (although I was trying to hide the fact).

We passed a small boy signalling a semaphore message with two flags much bigger than he was; very soon after, we passed the small girl he was signalling to. Tate informed us that the Spurn schoolkids practised semaphore every day. On our right hand side, the estuary side, was a new sea wall about two hundred yards long, and six feet wide on top. Iron bollards, mushroom-shaped for the tying-up of boats, were placed along its length, and I recall noticing that a length of rope ran from one of these into the water.

‘That’s where the sea does its worst!’ Leo Tate called over the beating of the engine. ‘In the school they call it a promenade. Of course, technically it’s a revetment!’

The end of our ride was the railway pier, and we took our engine onto it after collecting two more open wagons. The steamer was there waiting, just in from Grimsby, and bucking about on its moorings. Around the pier stood three gun batteries, with only one gun as yet in place – the one we’d already heard from. The other emplacements were signified by concrete dishes. There were the makings of what would be a signalling station; also shelters, magazines, workshops, and a largish wooden hut – about the dimensions of a village hall – with the words Hope and Anchor painted in giant white letters on one of its roof slopes. This was the RE boys’ wet canteen. The name was another of their little jokes, the pub in Kilnsea being called the Crown and Anchor. At about twenty yards’ distance from this stood the jakes, which took the form of one single outside lavatory, and another with washroom attached. Both were of a primitive appearance but were brick-built, and so more solid than the hutted village around them, having once belonged to a row of lifeboatmen’s cottages that had stood on the site.

‘You might think it looks like a shack,’ said Tate, indicating the Hope and Anchor, ‘but we have at present… I believe five barrels of John Smith’s bitter in there. Since you’re all here for the night,’ he continued (which was the first we’d heard of it), ‘you’ll perhaps sample a glass or two yourselves.’

I eyed Bernie Dawson as Tate spoke. He looked his usual good-natured self, leaning with folded arms against the boiler frame of Lord Mayor, but I was thinking: we could be in for a bit of bother here.

As we commenced the unloading, the weather gods were putting on a good show. The clouds were mainly black, but there was a kind of light resembling golden smoke whirling underneath them.

That ship held a regular hotchpotch of goods, all too small to be lifted by crane – including shells that we carried one at a time, and very carefully even though the detonators weren’t in. We didn’t know much about shells as yet; I imagined we’d be getting better acquainted in France. As we worked, the wind rose, the pier stakes set up a fearful groaning, and the ship clattered against the side, making the gangplank a dangerous place to walk. Some of the stuff was to be loaded onto the train – which made two trips back up the peninsula as we worked – and some passed hand to hand along the length of the pier to the stores round about. We worked under the direction of another RE sergeant who apparently knew field telephones inside out, and so found a friend in Oliver Butler who would quiz him in between carrying jobs.

We worked right through to evening without a break, for the ship had to get back to Grimsby before the storm came. About five o’clock, by which time all the gold had gone from the sky, we saw the headlamps of a War Department van coming up to the Hope. It had driven the length of Spurn – which would’ve been fun for the driver, since there were no roads to speak of – and held the food for our suppers. (The same van, we were told, would be returning in the morning with our breakfasts.)

Come six o’clock, a fast rain was falling, but the storm hadn’t quite got started. Lord Mayor was pulling away from the pier and moving fast, anxious to get away. All the RE blokes returned to their redoubt at the top end of the Narrows, and they’d taken Captain Quinn with them. He was to be wined and dined on the officers’ table at some function in Kilnsea for every RE man on the peninsula, officers and other ranks. The entry point to the peninsula was being guarded by our opposite numbers, the B Shift. The arrangement of men on Spurn would be a matter of importance come morning.

I was one of the last ones off the pier, and into the Hope and Anchor. The main part of it was a hall with a stove and makeshift stage. There was pile of kindling next to the stove, and Alfred Tinsley was using it to get the fire going. I put my pack and my rifle where the other blokes had put theirs: on the stage. There was a regular warren of little rooms at the back of the hall, behind the stage, and we’d have one of these apiece for kip. After a bit of sluice-down in the jakes it was seven o’clock, and I was ready for my tea. As I walked back into the hall, young Tinsley – who looked odd with a pint in his hand – was talking to Scholes about our absent friend, young William.

‘If he tells me one more time that throwing a bomb is easy as anything… I swear I’ll brain him,’ Scholes was saying.

Tinsley nodded: ‘And if I hear one more time that story about how he had bad teeth, and was worried he’d be rejected as unfit for service, so he went to the flipping dentists, and they pulled them out for free so’s he could do his patriotic duty…’

Oamer strolled over to them, pipe on the go, and Scholes asked him, ‘What exactly is Harvey telling these farmers?’

‘The times when the guns go off,’ said Oamer.

‘But what can they do about it? Clap their hands over their ears?’

‘They’ve to open windows in their houses,’ said Oamer, ‘… it’s to equalise the pressure, you know.’

‘He’ll be popular,’ said Scholes, ‘… weather like this.’

The place was village hall-like. I could just see the RE boys holding smoking concerts here. There was a piano on the stage; propped at the back of it was a giant mock-up of the Royal Engineers’ crest, and our packs and rifles were clustered around that. On the front edge of the stage the beer barrels – branded with the word ‘Smith’s’ – rested. Dawson was alongside them, superintending. I eyed him carefully; he looked all right so far. As a unit we’d drunk together only once before – at the above-mentioned Crown and Anchor in Kilnsea – and on that occasion we’d put the peg in after two pints apiece.

There was a stove in the centre of the room, a pile of papers and a basket of coal next to it for fuel, our supper bubbling away in a dixie on top. Alongside this, a trestle table was loaded with cutlery and enamel plates; jumbled round about were little wooden chairs, some with newspapers on them. From the roof beams hung Union Jacks and hurricane lamps in alternation. There were chalk marks on the floor, which was gritty with sand; these marks had numbers next to them, for the playing of some game made up by the RE boys – and there was a hoops board on the wall nearby, with a full complement of hoops hanging from the hooks.

We all had a couple of pints before setting about the food. Alfred Tinsley served it out, and it was either soup or stew depending on what his spoon brought up. I asked Dawson, who’d spoken to the bloke who’d delivered it, ‘What’d he say this was? I mean, did he give any clue?’

Dawson shrugged. ‘He said it was “something in the way of grub”.’

‘That’s a very good description of it,’ I said.

I was already feeling slightly canned. The beer was John Smith’s strongest variety, or had been made so by the way it was kept. Scholes was at the piano now, playing something slow and grand, which made a bit of a mockery of the clattering of cutlery as the blokes at the trestle table put away their stew.

‘Liszt?’ Oamer called over.

Scholes replied, ‘Sonata in B minor – don’t know it all.’

And he broke off in embarrassment.

‘I’ve heard Egypt’s on the cards for us,’ said Oliver Butler, mopping his plate with bread, and eyeing every man in turn.

‘Egypt?’ somebody said, flabbergasted.

‘Fighting the darkies.’

‘What darkies?’ Scholes called over, taking a pull from his glass before placing it on the piano top.

‘I don’t bloody know,’ said Butler. ‘Full of darkies, is Egypt. Some of them are Turkish. Overrun with the bloody Turks just at present, is Egypt.’

I was watching Oamer. He’d been smoking his pipe after his meal – his ‘post-prandial’ smoke, as he called it – but he now removed it from his mouth and stood. Dawson called out ‘Bide!’ on his behalf, and silence fell.

‘Your conversation, gentlemen,’ said Oamer, ‘has anticipated an announcement that Captain Quinn has asked me to make this evening.’

Scholes shut the piano lid, and walked over to the trestle table.

‘We are off to Egypt?’ someone gasped.

‘You are off’, said Oamer, speaking in such a way as to prove he didn’t normally use that word in that way, ‘to France – because that’s where the war is. And you are going next Thursday, when, after three days’ home leave – ’

(A small cheer at this.)

‘ – you will entrain from Hull to a sea port I am not at liberty to name, before proceeding to… somewhere I am also not at liberty to name in France.’

Oamer took two papers from his tunic pocket, and glanced down at the first, saying, ‘Captain Quinn has asked me to read the following: “Tell the men that I wish them all a very happy time on leave, short though it is. I know they will honour the battalion and the brigade in France, and I hope they may all come through the whole war safely.” He has also asked me to pass this amongst you.’ So saying, he handed this second paper to Scholes, who looked at it with a face like yesterday. ‘Captain Quinn will be here to address you himself in the morning,’ Oamer continued. Then he looked at his watch: ‘We turn in at ten o’clock, gentlemen.’

Silence in the room as each man figured his own picture of life at the front. Presently, the second paper came my way. It was a list, badly typed, giving further instances of North Eastern railway-men serving with other battalions who’d shown valour in the field. One of them, a fellow called Arnold Hogg, I knew. He was a clerk in the York goods station. He was serving with the West Riding Royal Field Artillery, and he’d been awarded the French Médaille Militaire. It didn’t say exactly what he’d done, but it must have been in aid of the French. At the presentation, a French Infantry Regiment had given him a guard of honour. I thought of Hogg: a big, round-faced bloke puffing and blowing as he rode his bike against the wind along Station Road. I could not imagine that guard of honour. Or at any rate, I could not imagine the blokes in it keeping a straight face.

I’d now had three pints and needed to drain off. I put on my cap, and opened the door of the Hope – with difficulty, for the wind was going all out to keep it shut. There was a great roaring that was either the sea or the wind, or both. The first lash of the rain nearly felled me and I was sodden by the time I reached the dark jakes. I knew there were candle stubs littered about in the place, but the flames had burnt out; the matches in my pocket were now useless, and there was no moon. The wind echoed strangely inside the brick cubicle, and made the sound of the flushing undetectable.

When I regained the Hope, a general chatter had started up again, and the twins were walking over to the hoops board. I watched them while drying at the stove. One of the pair – the brightest, Roy – made two chalk marks at the top of the little blackboard fixed alongside. These marks might have said ‘Roy’ and ‘Andy’, although not in a way generally recognisable. Roy took aim first. He threw three hoops. None landed on a hook, and after each one, Andy called out, ‘Missed, Roy-boy!’

Was this how the beer took the twins? (They’d put away as much as anyone save Dawson.) Or was it just their usual, wild way of going on? The queer thing was that they were both soon playing to a decent standard, and I recalled that they’d shown themselves decent marksmen at Alexandra Dock. (Well, it was known that platelayers, since they worked in the fields all day, spent half their time taking pot-shots at rabbits.)

Come nine-fifteen, Oamer was sitting on the edge of the stage with his pipe and a book, and Dawson, self-appointed custodian of the barrels, was filling glasses. The storm was blasting away outside. At the table, the topic of discussion was how the RE men would keep cases on the ships entering the Humber Estuary.

‘They send a man out, don’t they?’ said Scholes.

‘I wouldn’t fancy that job,’ I said, ‘going up to a dirty great German destroyer in a little rowing boat.’

‘But it might not be a German destroyer, remember,’ said Alfred Tinsley.

‘I suppose, if the blokes on the ship sink the bloke in the rowing boat, then that’s a bit of a giveaway.’

We’d both gone a bit daft with the beer.

‘Know nothing about signals, do you?’ said Oliver Butler. ‘They use a light. They ask for a password, just as we do here – only it’s done by flashes.’

At quarter to ten, every man was dead drunk, especially Dawson, and his face had that peeved look it had worn in the Bootham Hotel, but so far he had kept his behaviour in bounds. He was observing young Tinsley: ‘Thought you’d have turned in long since,’ he said. ‘Quite a stickler, ain’t you, son?’

‘Mmm… not quite the right word,’ said Oamer, who had rejoined the table, and it might be that Dawson gave this remark the go-by (for it was certainly meant in a spirit of amiability), or it might be that he gave a rather narrow look to our over-educated Corporal. At this point, Oliver Butler stood, and fixed his cap on. He looked about the room, and picked up one of the newspapers. He was off to the jakes.

In drink, Tinsley had become even more of a railway nut, and he now started in about how, when he graduated to driving, he’d oil round his engines not only at the start of a run, but at all principal stations on the run. After a few minutes of this, Dawson, who’d made two visits to the beer barrel since Tinsley had started on his speech, looked over and said, ‘Stow it, kid,’ and I thought: right, he’s turned.

I said, ‘Lay off him, won’t you?’

Dawson, who was walking over to the beer barrels yet again, turned and said, ‘Watch it, copper. I’ll stop the bloody clock on you.’

The room fell quiet at that, and there came only the sound of the storm. Scholes was eyeing me, looking apprehensive. I saw that Oliver Butler had returned, and that he was soaking wet but grinning by the door as he looked back and forth between Dawson and me. Dawson necked another pint rapidly as Oamer called, ‘That’s enough, Dawson. Time for some shut-eye.’

Dawson turned a questioning scowl on Oamer.

‘Bed,’ said Oamer.

‘Bide,’ said Dawson, shooting Oamer’s favourite word back at him.

I said, ‘Turn in, Dawson,’ and it was a deliberate provocation, since I had no authority to order him anywhere.

‘I don’t see your fucking stripe,’ he said.

Well, we were right back in the Bootham Hotel, with Oamer in place of the Chief. The difference was that the Chief could lay out any man. I walked towards Dawson; he walked towards me. I heard the ocean creaking, the wind ramming the walls, the strange whirlings of hot air within the stove. Part of me thought: I’ll be in France within the week. I had my passage booked. Giant fucking Saxons will be waiting to put my lights out. For a certainty, one of them’s going to succeed – and the condemned man doesn’t have to take lip from anyone. As we closed, Dawson said, ‘Here comes the constabulary,’ and he was holding his pint glass in such a way that I couldn’t tell whether he meant to drink from it or crown me with it. I ducked back; he ducked back; I came forward again with fists raised; Dawson came forwards likewise, but then he ducked back again for no good reason, slipped and cracked his head on one of the barrels.

‘You’ll pay for that, copper,’ he said, and I was caught between laughing and looking out for a bit of assistance, because Dawson had smashed his glass in the fall, and he was coming at me with the jagged edge of it.

‘You should never drink,’ I said.

‘It’s the likes of you that drive me to it, copper,’ said Dawson.

I looked down at my hands, and spat on them as we closed again. I didn’t know why, but I’d seen the Chief do it. I put my fists forward, and the broken glass, which Dawson happened to be swinging at that moment whisked against the edge of my right hand. There was a line of blood over the two outermost knuckles. Dawson had seen it; he looked… I would say surprised. I don’t believe any other man in the hall had noticed the blood, but a moment later it was just… people in motion, the room turning round, boots trampling on the broken glass, the roaring of the storm all around. I couldn’t get a belt in at Dawson, and he couldn’t get one in at me. The two of us were muffled by others… and it was Oliver Butler who was between us: Oliver Butler and Oamer, and I believed that even young Tinsley was involved. But it was Butler who’d come in first, and kept Dawson from me.

Dawson sat down on the edge of the stage, dazed, shaking his head. Oamer walked over to him, and a deal was struck between them. Dawson would have one more pint then go off. Meantime, Oliver Butler walked (dead straight, for he could hold his beer) over to his brothers, who were wrestling near the stove – which seemed to have been brought on by the sight of the other scrap. Butler said, ‘Time for the boys to turn in now,’ and a deal was struck there, too:

‘One more go on t’ ’oops, Ol,’ said Andy, or Roy. (They called their brother ‘Ol’, his full name being too much of a mouthful in their rapid patter.)

The two hurried back to the board, and played again in the way they’d started out the last time. Andy pitched his three hoops as Roy yelled, ‘Missed, Andy-lad… Missed Andy-lad… Missed Andy-lad,’ then Roy started his turn. When the first hoop missed, and Andy shouted, ‘Missed, Roy-boy!’ Oamer held up his hands:

‘We’ll take the rest as read, I think.’

They paid him no mind, and completed the ritual. Oliver then asked them, ‘Do the boys need to pay a visit?’

The pair clapped their caps on their heads, then one of them turned and opened the door. When they saw the storm, they both said ‘Oh mother!’ before dashing out into it with great enthusiasm. A few minutes later, they came back laughing (and sodden), and trooped off to the back rooms, with Oliver Butler following.

‘Rum,’ observed Oamer, who was standing near the stove, pipe in hand, and I wondered what it would take to stir him up. Nothing had done so far.

At quarter after ten, he and I put out the lamps, all except one, and when Oamer went off to his kip, I settled down by this remaining light with the Yorkshire Post, since I was too squiffed for The Count of Monte Cristo, which I had in fact yet to start reading.

But I couldn’t concentrate, so I examined my cut knuckle. The cut would be practically gone by morning. My mind was full of thoughts of France. I stood up, rounded up the stray glasses and put them near the barrels on the stage. The stove was still burning, and the door was open. I closed it, in case sparks might blow out. Oamer had left the message from Captain Quinn about our posting, and the list of valorous railway-men folded together on the table top, and I didn’t touch those. I then made for the warren of rooms at the rear. The men slept on their groundsheets with greatcoats over, and folded tunics for pillows. I searched out an unoccupied room with a lit candle in my hand. All the doors were ajar, or not there at all, and it was like a little exhibition of sleeping men. Young Tinsley and Dawson were both well away in the first two booths, while Scholes slept with a sort of smile on his face – music running through his head, perhaps, and not thoughts of France. I’d not seen him smile since the day of his enlistment. One thing Oamer and Butler had in common: their quarters were neat, and they both kept hair brushes by their pillows. The next room was empty, and that was because the twins had shared, and they both occupied the next one along. They lay down next to each other, but were not asleep. They had not made pillows of their tunics, and their discarded uniforms lay in a trail between the door and where they lay. There was a candle stub between them, and as I looked in (neither saw me, I was certain of it), one of the pair blew it out.

‘I see it’s gone dark in here,’ said the other.

‘You can’t see in the dark,’ said the first, and that set them both spluttering with laughter.

My own room smelt of distemper; it held three pasteboard boxes full of old screws. It had a little window, too. I looked through it, and the storm was still there.

I was woken by the sound of a motor; I stood and walked over to the window. There was a guilty look about the weather, as though it was aware of having overdone it the night before. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the tangled wrecks of half a dozen ships on the sand, but there was only the gentlest breeze, a milkiness to the waters, and a War Department van pulling to a halt. It was the breakfast bloke from the farm. I was bursting for a piss, but otherwise feeling not too bad, considering. I pulled on my boots and walked out, past the gallery of sleepers. All the blokes seemed arranged as when I’d turned in, down to the trail of clothes leading between the door of the twins’ room and the twins themselves.

The bloke had the back of his van open and the hot boxes were stacked in there.

‘Want a hand bringing it in?’ I said.

‘Aye,’ he said, in a thoughtful sort of way.

‘Hold on, I’ll just go to the jakes.’

Three minutes later we set about it.

‘How’s Cobble Farm?’ I enquired, as we loaded the stuff onto the trestle table.

‘Well, it’s covered in shit,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I like it.’

Two empty beer glasses stood on the table. I thought I’d cleared the lot away the night before – I was certain I had done. Also, I had left the two papers – Quinn’s message and the list of valorous railwaymen – together, but they were now separate on the table top.

‘Bit blowy last night, eh?’ the bloke was saying.

The stove door was open as well, yet I’d closed it the night before. It was all ashes in there – all except a scrap of paper at the front. I fished it out. There were printed words on it: ‘London, E.C.’, then, underneath, ‘Telephone – 2087 HOLBORN’. The address was familiar, somehow. I looked up at the stage. All the kit bags and rifles were there as before.

‘Oh,’ the food bloke was saying, ‘question from the sentry blokes up top: did the kid get here all right?’

‘What kid?’

‘Kid on a bike.’

‘William Harvey? He’s at the farm.’

‘No, pal. I was at the farm, and I had the barn to myself.’

‘He was meant to go there.’

‘Well he thought different. He came by the sentry post here last night, or this morning anyhow – half past midnight sort of time. Said he was under orders to rejoin his unit after completing a special duty. He was on a push bike. Hold on… Did he not pitch up?’

The blokes were filtering in from the back rooms, putting on their tunics: Oamer, Scholes and Oliver Butler. A little while later came the twins and Alfred Tinsley, all fixing their caps on their heads. Roy Butler had a fag on the go. ‘Anyone seen Young William?’ I called out, and we went through it all again. He wasn’t supposed to be here. When Dawson appeared, he admitted to feeling ‘pretty cheap’; otherwise he was amiability himself. Had he seen William?

‘No, mate, I’ve been asleep.’

Half an hour later, breakfast had been eaten at the trestle table, but Oamer did not feel able to light his pipe. By all accounts, nobody had seen the boy, or heard any disturbance in the night. All the blokes looked grave, except the twins, who were out of hand as usual, occasionally laughing. Quinn then appeared, together with his opposite number, Leo Tate. As they entered, Quinn was saying to Tate, ‘And this morning not a cloud in the sky! Couldn’t be more splendid!’

But the moment he saw us, he was in fits, and he told Oamer to fall us in. Quinn held a cap in his hand. It bore the badge of our battalion, and the man who’d lost it would find himself on a charge. Quinn had discovered the cap near the sea wall, or, as he put it, ‘Captain Tate’s revetment’. It was one of the small-sized ones, and it was a disgrace that no name was written inside it, but this was not such a disgrace really: every man was supposed to have written his name on the band of the cap, but the ink would be repeatedly wiped off by sweat. Quinn surveyed us. Every man present undoubtedly had a cap on his head. Quinn enquired, ‘Corporal Prendergast, where’s Private Harvey?’

So Quinn, too, had expected the lad to be with us.

‘If I might have a word with you about that, sir,’ said Oamer.

We were put at ease, and I heard snatches of the conflab. Oamer explained that the boy had come past the sentries in the small hours.

‘Well yes, I know that,’ said Quinn. ‘The sentries told us all about it when Captain Tate, myself and the other officers came back from the village. He’d gone through a little while before.’

I thought: they must have been going some at Kilnsea, to be returning at that hour.

‘He was under a misapprehension as to his orders, sir,’ said Oamer.

‘So it appeared to me,’ said Quinn, ‘so it appeared to me. But he’s not here now, you say? How is that possible? Once on Spurn, he can’t have left it. I mean, the only way off is via the sentries… except by boat, of course.’

He eyed Oamer sadly for a while, before saying, ‘I think we’d better have a scout about.’

As Oamer was giving orders for the search, I saw Quinn looking down at the cap in his hand. He looked up and said to me – since my eyes just happened to meet his at that moment – ‘You know, there’s blood on the inside of this cap.’ I thought of the bit of Latin on the cap badge. Oamer had translated it for me: ‘Whither the fates call.’

Under the high blue sky, we combed the peninsula – us and the RE men both. We searched individually, so that every man was alone with his thoughts, and I wondered how many were inclining my way – towards a suspicion of foul play.

I searched both sides of the peninsula up towards the Narrows, and there were two more of the kids from the school practising semaphore. I watched, mesmerised, as they whirled their great red flags into position and then froze, blank-faced, before whirling them into a different position.

It was about half after midday when I heard the first shout, which came from Scholes. He’d found the bike – it had evidently been lying in a dune a little way inland of the revetment. We all had a look at it for a while, leaving it in place for whoever would be investigating (our regimental military police, as I imagined). Then, on Quinn’s orders, we spread out again for a further search.

The second shout went up half an hour later, and it came from Oamer, who’d been walking along the revetment. He was bending over and looking into the sea. He bent rather than crouched – bent as a woman does, and I could see his great, khaki-covered arse. Walking fast over the dunes towards him, I thought: you don’t normally look at the sea in that way. Oamer was making rather a dainty inspection, of the sort more suited to the examination of frog spawn in a village pond; he was next to one of the iron bollards, the one with a length of rope attaching to it. I followed the rope with my eye as I took up position next to Oamer, and looked where he looked.

In the water, the rope held the just-submerged body of Harvey by virtue of having twisted itself once around his middle. It held him with no effort in the beautifully clear water, which slopped against the sea wall in a relaxed and casual sort of way. The motion of the waves would carry Fusilier Harvey two feet or so away from the wall, then two feet back – out and back, out and back, but never more than two feet either way. Oamer was saying nothing, but breathing hard, either because he was concentrating, somehow, on the body in the water, or just because he was not in the peak of condition. Five minutes later, we had the entire unit around us, and Harvey was stretched out on the sea wall.

The twins, between them, said:

‘Oh…’

‘Muth…’

‘Ah…’

So making ‘Oh mother’ their favourite expression.

Harvey was very dead, and had apparently been given a new head. He looked to have been clobbered mightily at least twice, for he had the appearance of a sort of a bug. His left eye was black and swollen, and the right one was quite lost in a bulge of purple-coloured flesh, from which the lashes sprouted at wrong angles, so that it was like a kind of anemone. This eye, which had winked at me, was now locked in a permanent wink, as though Harvey had just let on the biggest secret of all. As for the rest of him… all that seemed smaller; and the seawater seemed to me to be acting upon him even as he lay on the dry stones, shrinking him fast before our eyes.

Of the kid’s pack, rifle and cap there was no sign.

He was the first casualty of the battalion. Would he figure in the roll of honour? Could it be said that he’d died in the course of duty?

Come two o’clock we were all back in the Hope, drinking tea – all save Quinn, who’d gone off with Tate to make telephone calls. Fried bread and jam was going for those that wanted it, but at first nobody did. People seemed minded to avoid the subject of the actual corpse, so it fell out that Scholes was the star turn, telling everyone about how he’d turned up the bike… Practically tripped over it, he had. It had been half buried in the sand, which Scholes reckoned must have been wind-blown sand. The events of the morning seemed to have galvanised him. Perhaps they’d come as a distraction from thoughts of France, or was he just glad not to have copped it himself?

With his pipe in his mouth, but not lit, Oamer called me over to him.

‘You’re a detective,’ he said, now examining his pipe, ‘what do you make of it? Confidentially, I mean.’

‘The essential data… ’ I said. ‘Our lot were the only men on Spurn when William pitched up. There’s been no lifeboat crew since the military came here; the school is the only civilian operation – it’s a day school and no one lives on the premises. I don’t believe any boat could have landed in that weather. As far as I know all the RE men went up to Kilnsea last night. Their story is that when they came back, the sentries mentioned that the kid had come by. That was none of their affair, and they went directly to their billets and to sleep. The story from this end is that all the blokes were in by bed by half after ten. I can verify that, since I was the last one to turn in. Every man says he slept through the night, and saw nothing of the kid.’

‘You think Dawson slept through the night?’ enquired Oamer.

It was the obvious question, given what had gone on the night before.

I said, ‘He seemed dead to the world when I turned in.’

‘Anything else?’ said Oamer.

I didn’t mention that, whatever the situation at ten-thirty, it seemed unlikely to me that no man had got up in the night to visit the jakes or, more likely, take a piss directly outside the door of the hut.

‘If the bike had been on the sea wall,’ I said, ‘there might be grounds for thinking Harvey had tried to ride it along there, and come off it.’

I didn’t want to say that the kid might have made away with himself by jumping in the sea, because that seemed even more of a slander than suggesting he’d be thick-headed enough to bike along the revetment in a storm. There was a small chance he might have jumped though (smashing his head against the wall in the process), because he was in a funk about going to war. It might be that he’d been the one who disturbed the papers on the table. Perhaps he’d read of our posting, and of the plucky railwaymen, and knew he wasn’t up to the mark.

Scholes had made a start on the fried bread, which had been prepared by the van driver. He – Scholes – was also scared of going to war, but at least he was open about the fact. He went glooming about the place, but the other blokes didn’t mind that. It made them feel braver. William, on the other hand, with his talk of what he was going to do to the Hun, which everyone knew was complete rot – he annoyed most of the blokes. I didn’t see how any of it could lead to murder, but I could see how it would lead to rows.

For example, Scholes: being a bit yellow himself, he particularly resented the kid’s war-like talk.

As for Tinsley: he and William were rivals – two young bloods – and made no secret of it.

Bernie Dawson? Sober, he was the straightest of fellows, and good company with it. Drunk, the man was a liability, and he had been drunk, and spoiling for a scrap before lights out.

The twins? They seemed at times a pair of wild men, barely kept in check by their older brother. Their feelings about William, or any other matter, were a mystery to me, but William had certainly been unnerved by them.

Oliver Butler… He seemed to have me in his sights, not William Harvey. When he’d come to my aid against Dawson, I’d thought that might indicate a change in our relations, but evidently not. At any rate, he was glaring at me from over near the stove at that very moment. But I didn’t see what he could have against Harvey. The kid would be beneath his notice.

I kept all this back from Oamer, together with the disturbance of the papers on the table; the beer glasses; the door of the stove. Somebody – or two people, in view of the glasses – had been up in the night, and that was fact. Why did I keep all this back? To give me time to think, and out of loyalty to the section. I would be fighting alongside these men in France within a matter of days. Also because… well… was the fellow questioning me above suspicion? Who did Oamer write his letters to, not being a married man, and having, as far as was known, no sweetheart? And why wasn’t he an officer? What kept him back? Was it something known to the army brass? All his usual jollity seemed to have drained out of him as he stood before me.

The glare Butler was sending my way had redoubled. He didn’t like to see me so thick with the NCO.

‘Another thing,’ I said. ‘Did the kid come past the sentries with his pack and his rifle?’

‘His pack’s still at the farm; that’s where it was left, as arranged. On his bike he carried his rifle and his haversack, with a bite to eat in it and a map of the farms. He had both on him when he passed the sentries.’ Oamer was still examining his pipe, as though it belonged to another man altogether. ‘It’s going to be the devil of a job to get to the bottom of this,’ he said. ‘Half the battalion’s already in France, and we’ll be there ourselves in no time.’

What he meant, I thought, was that a lot more deaths were coming, in comparison with which the present one would no longer signify.

‘That’s this war all over,’ I said, without quite knowing what I meant.

‘One trouble compounds another,’ said Oamer.

I fancied that I saw water in his eye, and it occurred to me that he and I had been the only two in the unit not openly hostile to Harvey. The kid liked army types – not pressed men, so to speak, and not railwaymen. I was ‘army’ in that I was a copper. (Yes, plain clothes, but the Chief would parade us every once in a while on the main ‘Up’ platform of York station, much to the amusement of the other blokes.) Oamer had been in the Territorials, and was an NCO. He was a military man in spite of not looking the part; in spite of not being naturally suited to it. Harvey was perhaps a similar case in that he’d gone into a world where bravery was all in spite of not being overly brave. That took courage. He’d worked hard at keeping up an illusion – which, perhaps, accounted for that water in Oamer’s eye.

Butler, Scholes, Dawson and Tinsley were near the stove. All had now made a start on the grub. The twins sat on the edge of the stage. Andy was playing with his rifle in a gormless sort of way, and Roy was smoking.

Butler addressed every man in the room – although he was eyeing me in particular – as he said, ‘What do we think then, boys? Suicide?’

Dawson nodded to himself. Scholes did likewise, muttering, ‘Made away with himself, that’s it.’

Tinsley said nothing. He was inspecting his cap. On the stage, Roy Butler stared straight ahead, and continued to smoke as his brother – larking about – repeatedly banged him on the arm with the butt of his rifle. A great engine roar came from beyond the window. The breakfast van was starting up, and taking William Harvey back to Hull, along with the empty food boxes.

Thorpe-on-Ouse and York

I arrived back at our house in Thorpe late in the evening. Only a few chinks of light showed in the village, and both the pubs were closed even though it was not yet ten o’clock. On walking through our front door, my first duty, after kissing the wife, was to be taken into the children’s bedrooms. They had been expecting me, and would on no account go to sleep until I arrived. Harry climbed out of his bed, and met me in the hallway, holding a candle.

‘Dad,’ he said, ‘what do you think of The Count of Monte Cristo?’, asking the question as though it was a matter of the greatest urgency and importance, and the trouble was that he’d actually read it himself, after a fashion, and been very taken with the whole idea of it.

I ruffled his hair, and said, ‘Ask me another’, and he didn’t see the joke at all, but just walked away.

I followed the boy into his room, saying I was saving the book for France, at which he bucked up slightly. His room was fuller of books than I remembered. Harry was shaping up as an intellect. I went through to Sylvia’s room; she was half asleep. She opened one eye, and, looking at me rather narrowly, said, ‘I’ve been talking to Daisy Backhouse about you.’ Daisy Backhouse was the daughter of Lillian and Peter. ‘She says your best bet is to get wounded.’

‘Really?’

‘Quite badly. Then they’ll send you home.’

‘Tell Daisy Backhouse she’s being far too gloomy, and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’

‘I might tell her the first part,’ Sylvia said, and then: ‘Give me a kiss anyway. I’m rather tired.’

‘She seems to have become rather a cool customer since I saw her last,’ I said to the wife, as she turned down the gas on the landing.

‘It’s how she hides her feelings,’ said the wife, who, after having a last look in at Harry, returned to the Count of Monte-bloody Cristo. ‘You have had it for a year, Jim; it was a special edition and he did buy it with his own money.’

Later, in our own bedroom, the wife made herself available to me. Well, she was doing her bit for morale, but it was an awkward business, which might have gone off better had she produced my coming-home present – two bottles of Smith’s purchased at the employee’s preferential rate at the Co-Operative Stores – before rather than after. As we sat side by side on the bed, she let on that, what with half my wages (which the North Eastern Railway was paying at the full rate), the separation allowance, and her own pay from the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, she was better off than ever. So there were no worries on that front. She then asked me about life in the billets.

I said, ‘On Spurn Head, you mean?’

‘So that’s where you were?’

‘You better forget I said that.’

I told her what had happened to Harvey, angling the account to make it look like suicide.

‘The poor boy killed himself,’ she said obligingly, then, ‘I’m not going to think about it any more.’

She started talking about her own work. She herself was still in favour of the war, so she wasn’t a peace activist exactly, but the concern of her committees was that the war should be fought ‘fairly’.

‘What does that mean?’ I said, and she told me it meant that men or their wives should not lose out by enlisting, and that the food price rises should be kept in check. She had also helped to set up – together with the Church of England Men’s Society (or some such outfit of do-gooders) – a ‘Soldiers and Sailors Buffet’ in an old carriage that had been shunted into place at the bay platform number eight at York station.

I said I didn’t like the sound of the Church of England Men.

‘Why ever not?’ said the wife.

‘There ought not to be any of them left. They ought all to be in France.’

‘Their average age is fifty.’

‘Oh.’

‘And some of them are awfully handsome, considering.’

This, I knew, was my cue to have another go at love-making; and a more satisfactory result was obtained this time.

The next day, I went into town with the wife, and she marched me straight up to Walton’s, the outfitters on Parliament Street, where they had mannequins in the window showing officers’ service dress. Officers, the wife informed me, were able to choose their own colours for their shirts and ties, within reason. She’d been in and asked about this. She thought the set in the window would suit me. It was labelled ‘Mustard’.

‘But I’m not an officer,’ I said.

‘But you will be.’

It was a bright day, if cold, and York seemed full of slackers. Of course, it always had been, but you noticed them now there weren’t supposed to be any. They’d all have some tale about why they’d put off joining the colours; special circumstances would have urged them to hold back: ‘I’m worried about me old mum, you see. She can’t be left for a minute.’ The usual loungers stood at the gates of the Museum Gardens, smoking away, and not in the least put out by the sight of men going past in uniform, because there were plenty of those, York being a garrison town. All the pubs were open, I was relieved to see, but they had funny little notices posted on their doors, these being to do with new regulations of the York Licensing Justices. They would be closed by nine – and this was why Thorpe-on-Ouse had been dark the night before. The shops were all trading normally, if anything looking busier than before. There were more flags about, but fewer horses (horses had been commandeered) which meant more motor vehicles. I looked at the city in a different way. The Victorian War memorials meant something more to me now. In truth they made my stomach lurch, and the beauty of the whole place, with its picturesque buildings, chiming churches and festive air seemed something precious, something that might soon be lost, or lost to me at any rate. The cocoa smell was in the air from the chocolate factories, and that too made me feel nervous, but then it always had done for some reason. The scene in every street reminded me of the postcards sold from Field’s, the stationer in Stonegate, which showed York scenes and were all inscribed ‘Old York’, whether they showed the particularly old buildings or not.

On Ouse Bridge, I spied Black Leonard, the darkie who advertised pleasure cruises on the vessel called The River King, which was known as Black Len’s Barge, and was the only pleasure cruiser to run all year round. Black Leonard wore his sandwich board as usual, giving the prices, and at the bottom was a new notice, ‘Wounded Soldiers Go Free’.

The wife looked with approval at that. It was ‘only fair’. As we turned into Coney Street, she told me that the Co-Operative ladies were proposing to dig up the cricket pitches of the city, so as to grow food for the returning and wounded soldiers. I said, ‘I think they’d rather watch the cricket’. But the wife knew nothing of cricket. If a man knew as little about Women’s Co-Operation as the wife knew about cricket she’d be down on him like a ton of coal.

On Coney Street, a bill for the Press read ‘N.E.R. BATTALION MEN OFF ON ACTIVE SERVICE’, which somehow gave the impression that we were all dead keen to be off. I didn’t buy the paper. It would be all about the successful conclusion of operations at Gallipoli, just as though the object of the attack all along had been to retreat. I stood and watched the traffic of blokes going in and out of Sinclair’s, the tobacconist. That was the Chief’s favourite shop, but I did not want to strike the Chief on my ramble about the city; I wasn’t up to hearing him talk of the new machine guns. I would come back and see him when I had a decoration or a commission.

The next day was my appointed one for rejoining the battalion, and the wife accompanied me to the station in the early afternoon. Here again, I avoided the Chief – in fact, the police office seemed closed down entirely – and the wife offered to show me the famous Soldiers and Sailors Buffet on platform eight. I of course had my uniform on, so the ladies inside were pleased to see me, and to serve me tea and a bun, which I did not want, having lately eaten sausages and fried potatoes in Thorpe-on-Ouse, but they were particularly keen to see Lydia, who talked to them all until my train time.

We naturally had a bit of a choky moment as I leant down to her from the carriage window. With the train pulling away, she called out, ‘I’ll send you a hamper, Jim!’ I believe because it seemed to her the safest thing to say just then.