The Unreasoning Earth

Sixteen

One

Julie remembered how the bull’s-eye lantern had swung in the dark, a cool clear green against the greyness of the platform and black bulk of the train. The escaping steam which surged around the footboards of the express had drowned Tom’s words as he clasped her in his arms.

It had been a final, desperate embrace, pressing Julie against his army greatcoat, leaving her open-mouthed with the sudden ache of loss as he released her, turned and boarded the train.

The waiting porter slammed the door, straightened the brass handle, then stood between Julie and the train, which moved away with sounds like enormous metallic sobs.

She walked, then ran, with the train, staring at the dimly lit angles of Tom’s face as he leaned waving from the window, hair black beneath his uniform cap. At the end of the platform she snatched off her own hat, so that his last sight of her should be of her golden hair. A memory of their most loving moments to carry with him. In seconds the taillights of the express disappeared around the curve in the track.

She stood staring into the blackness, her mind searching for comfort, but finding none. ‘It’s like death,’ she whispered, the feeling of bereavement all she recognized within herself.

How long she stood before a heavy measured tread sounded behind her, Julie did not know. It was the porter. She thought he looked an old soldier, his full grey moustache a replica of Kitchener’s, his measured stride that of a slow pacing sentry.

‘Veteran of the Boer War, miss, I know what it’s like,’ he confirmed, standing in a companionable way be her side. ‘I reckon it’s worse for you lasses - waiting. Although a lot of a man’s war can be waiting, too, you know. Standing by for action.’

‘I know it can’t be fighting all the time, but. . . .’ Julie tried to pry, but the old soldier was not to be out-manoeuvred from his position as comforter.

‘Letters! That’s what the boys want, miss. You write your boy regular, he’ll like that better than any mufflers or mittens!’ A taint of tobacco, soot and steam, caught in the thick worsted of his uniform, came to her as he lifted an arm to shepherd her back along the platform.

‘You go and have a cup of tea, miss, then off home with you! No sense hanging around this draughty station.’

More to oblige the kindly porter than for any other reason, Julie turned into the station buffet. She sat at a corner table beneath a gas-mantle that popped and guttered below its fluted glass shade as customers came and went.

She watched young soldiers cluttered with bulky kit bags and rifles, buying pies and drinks — terribly young soldiers: boys, some sixteen, some rumoured even younger, who had added two or three years to their age when volunteering. The recruiting officers were not interested in questioning their unlikely majorities: if they looked more or less old enough, they were old enough. Julie felt their uniforms made some of them look almost childlike, their peaked caps emphasizing the unwrinkled inexperience of their faces, the naked angles of their jaws, the knee-high puttees precisely bandaging the awkward ankle bones of boys, above the brave black shine of men’s boots. King and country had called them, and nobly a hundred thousand had flocked to answer, leaving mothers and sweethearts to grieve at home.

As she stirred her tea her mind conjured Tom as she had first seen him, working in her father’s hay field. Tall, dark, brown arms muscular below the rolled shirt sleeves, light blue eyes bright against his tan. The early image frightened her. How soon, when she could still feel where his arms had pressed her, had Tom become a thing from the past, a memory.

She remembered the pear Tom had brought with his lunch that first day. How he had bitten into its juiciness, staring at her with such a speculative eye that she had blushed, and seemed to feel his teeth as keenly as the pear! Her eyes often shyly met his bold glance that first afternoon.

Tom and his widowed father had just moved to a small holding on the edge of the village. Tom, hiring himself out for extra work on neighbouring farms, soon became popular for his hard work, dignified uprightness, and directness of gaze. From their first meeting, the first exchange of looks, Julie and Tom’s love had run like a dry grass fire. There had been a positiveness in his courtship that had startled and delighted Julie. She schemed time to watch the strong curve of his back and swing of his arms as his scythe hissed through the thick grasses with the sound of a breaking wave. As each great swathe of grass fell she knew that she had lost her heart and heels just as finally to Tom Bright.

By the time the stooked wheat-sheaves stood like the tents of a myriad tiny nomads, they were walking out regularly together, and before the great corn stacks were thatched and the fields gleaned, Tom had been to the farmhouse for Sunday tea.

‘I know what I want,’ Tom said as he and Julie walked into the far parts of the home orchard. ‘You, and a market garden as big as your father’s farm.’

They had laughed, but knew it was true.

‘And you, what do you want?’ Tom asked gently, memorizing her fingers with his own.

‘Oooh!’ she had thought to make him laugh, but had suddenly dropped all pretence, to answer quietly, To be part of your dream.’

She remembered how her words had brought a moment of fulfilment, Tom’s fingers suddenly still on hers, she had read humility and pride in his bowed head. For long seconds he had not moved, but she had felt his love flow like a great tide, engulfing her, before ever his arms took her to him.

Remembering, she could no longer sit stirring tea. She rose hastily, left the station and made her way back to the farm. Her mother made more tea, which this time Julie drank, and began to talk of the wedding.

‘It’s the end of October now, not long until March, and you’ll have all the arrangements to attend to, seeing as Tom won’t be home much afore your wedding day.’

It seemed like a game they played, steadily counting the days like squares on a snake-and-ladder board. Making clothes, folding away linen. A letter from France took them up a little ladder of joy, pushing forward to the ‘home’ square, 20 March 1916, the day Tom should start his home leave.

But the serpent with its head on the last square before ‘home’ loomed inescapable as March passed with no news of Tom. The newspapers told sketchily of a big push by the enemy, and later called it one of the first battles of the Somme Campaign. ‘The Somme’ the name was on everyone’s lips like the tolling of a great bell.

Full summer brought tremendous lists of casualties. The family shopping day crept from Friday to Thursday because this was the morning the weekly newspapers arrived, and they had begun to print lists of local casualties.

Always there was a little group of concerned people around the village shop, shaking out their papers and anxious to explain, to anyone who would listen, the relationship of someone in the village to a local name appearing on the list. One Thursday the group was larger than usual, and became silent when they saw Julie and her mother approaching. They fell back to let them through.

‘Come on,’ Martha Stead gripped her daughter’s arm as the girl’s step faltered.

Then someone held up a broadsheet for them to see. They peered at the smudged newsprint, scouring the Bs with their anxiety, twice, three times. Julie’s mother looked round questioningly, and immediately a finger pointed much further down the list.

‘Oh, my God!’ Martha exclaimed. ‘It’s your cousin Harry listed in the dead!’

The finger pointed again.

‘And his father. Poor Madge! I must go to her!’

As she followed her mother home, the irreverent thought came to Julie that her Aunt Madge had been glad Harry and his father had been together in France ....

Julie washed, baked, scrubbed and polished after her parents had gone to town to see Madge, giving herself no time to think.

Returning from seeing his sister, Charles Stead threw himself into his farm work just as feverishly. There was an anger in the man that only hard physical work seemed to salve, and a sadness that touched Julie most intimately. It separated father and daughter into two camps, one of despair, one of faith. Their deep natural affection for each other made each try sorties-of kind remarks and understanding glances, but the encounters were painful, failing to find any point of truce.

Julie heard a new harshness in her father’s voice from this time, and he talked bitterly of ‘human cannon-fodder’. She came to feel she carried her burden of belief in Tom’s return alone.

Every morning she walked down the slope of the home fields to stand in still and silent witness to the postman passing in the lane. His cheery ‘nothing today’, became a sorry and minimal shake of his downcast head as the weeks, and months, passed. But Julie still believed, when she saw hope die in the eyes of her mother, father and brother . . . every day she believed anew.

In late August her father learned of a soldier from Tom’s regiment who was convalescing at a large private house opened nearby for the wounded. Julie insisted on accompanying her father to visit him.

They found the soldier in the grounds, a nurse pushing him in a basket bath chair.

‘So you’re Tom Bright’s girl,’ he seemed pleased to see them. ‘Aye, I remember your picture - you so fair and Tom so dark - handsome chap. . . .’ He paused, and the nurse parked him by a bench.

‘I’ll be back for him at tea-time,’ she told them, as if people with legs heard better than those without.

‘You saw Tom go into battle?’ Julie’s father prompted.

‘Aye,’ with reluctance now the man recalled. ‘Some of us were split up into sixies and sent forrard into shell holes ahead of the main line. Tom was in a hole to the right of me. We were supposed to break up the enemy before they reached our lines,’ he laughed bitterly at the impossibility of the task. ‘There were too many of them. Some of our chaps ran at the last minute. You couldn’t blame them - except there was nowhere to go. I didn’t see Tom run,’ his eyes searched Julie’s, sharp and urgent with this reassurance.

‘No, didn’t see Tom again. Then our machine-gun jammed and I tried to run. I knew when I was hit, the shell killed four of the others, but — well, I can still feel my toes now! Don’t seem to make much sense, does it?’

They agreed it didn’t, and silently wished the nurse would come and take him for his tea, and were ashamed for wishing so.

‘It doesn’t look hopeful, my lass,’ Charles Stead said as they walked back to their pony and trap.

‘But I love him, I love him, Father.’

Only the tightening of her father’s jaw showed that he had heard.

That night Julie did not sleep, violent images of battle grouping every time her eyelids closed. Weary with imaginings she rose just before dawn, and took her wedding dress from the back of her closet. Hanging it from the picture-rail she turned back the shrouding cotton sheet, and found comfort in running her hands over the heavy satin. A reality after the solitary fantasies of the night.

Sleep was no friend as the weeks went by, nightmares often startling her from her pillow, and sometimes she woke herself calling Tom’s name. One restless night she wandered to her window, and gazed up into a sky blanched with moonlight, then gasped at what she saw. A huge, ridged, cigar shaped object seemed to overhang the whole two hundred yards of the home spinney, a distant throbbing reached her ears. So gigantic was the thing’s menace that she instinctively stepped further back into the room, then turned and fled first to her parents’ room, then to waken her brother.

‘It’s a zeppelin! Quick! A zeppelin! It’s come - the war!’

Her brother was first outside, then her father pulling his trousers over the shirt he slept in, and finally her mother cautiously from the front door, her faded golden hair tousled around her shoulders.

‘It’s following the river in the moonlight,’ Charles Stead declared. ‘It’ll be after the munitions factory in town - and there’s nothing we can do. . . .’

Julie noticed that her mother was watching William. The fifteen-year-old stood to attention, as if already hearing a far off bugle-call, and his eyes shone with excitement. Julie felt it was only regard for his parents that kept Will from trying his luck at the town recruiting office. But for how long? It seemed the sight of this monstrous thing brought out the deep truths in all of them, showed what they most wanted and cared for. She thought of Tom.

They watched until distance made a circle of the zeppelin’s length.

A glow brightened and mushroomed on the horizon, then another, then a whole line in rapid succession, and, as they stood holding their breaths, the dull heavy thuds of the explosions reached their ears.

‘God Almighty!’ Charles Stead breathed. ‘It’s against all the laws of war. It’s a new age of destruction.’

With a sob that startled all of them Martha began to cry. Her crying became loud, uncontrolled, almost an indulgence against future trials.

Charles Stead shepherded his family through to the kitchen and gave them all a tot of brandy, then motioned his children away, so he could comfort his wife in private.

Julie could find no words for the terrifying feeling of vulnerability that pursued her after the night of the zeppelin, the night her mother had cried, only a new gauntness of cheek and an occasional air of abstracted weariness - the sewing held forgotten, eggs left unwashed - betrayed her fears.

Julie saw her sufferings mirrored in the faces of her family, knew they came to wish she would lay down the hope she carried like a great cross. But the stubbornness of her love was obsessive, beyond reason.

She clung to memories of their most tender moments. How Tom had with trembling fingers traced the waves of hair about her face (she played the game of pretend with her own fingers), but how dark with love and steady with desire his eyes had been! How he had lifted her high from a field-gate, refusing to put her down, the moment starting with laughter, and ending with sobering passion. So many reasons she could find for belief.

As days lumbered clumsily by, Julie packed her time with work, her evenings with sewing, writing postcards to friends, and attending a home nursing and first-aid class organized in the village by the local doctor. She made a rule that in the late evenings and through waking nights, she would only recall times she and Tom had spent together, searching out every minute detail from her memory, not allowing the quiet solitary times of darkness to terrify her with sombre speculations.

Two

On 1 October 1916, when there had been no news of any kind, official or unofficial, for over nine months, Julie overheard a remark as she left the village shop.

‘It’s no use her waiting, he’ll not come back now.’

By the time she reached home a dreadful feeling of languor had overcome her. The words, spoken so dispassionately, seemed to carry a terrible weight, a confirmation of the evidence: the enormous losses at Verdun; of her Aunt Madge; of the dark doubts she fought away at nights.

The kitchen was empty. She sat in the old rocking-chair by the range and imagined the comfort of rocking and keening, but knew the action would be an admission of loss. Julie held the chair quite motionless, feeling she was balanced on an edge. If she rocked, she mourned, if she mourned, she accepted Tom’s death.

She frowned as a bustle of noise brought her back to reality. Hurrying footsteps in the stone-flagged hall, then faces — her mother, father, brother, seemed to crowd the door.

‘What is it?’ Julie asked . . . afraid.

Her mother made gentle calming motions with her hands.

‘You’ve heard something?’

Her mother nodded looking close to tears. She held out a tattered dark brown postcard, which Julie (bund she could not reach for.

‘About Tom?’

‘Go on, lass!’ her father urged.

Her hand trembled as at last she took the card. As she turned it her mother began to cry.

The message seemed full of numbers, foreign place names, then the words: ‘Prisoner of War’.

‘Oh, Julie,’ her mother’s tears flowed freely now, ‘a prisoner of war! What will he be like?’

‘Why -’ The question astonished Julie, she closed her eyes to imagine. ‘He’ll be.. . Tom! He’ll be Tom!’ Her joy escaped in a sound that was half laughter, half tears.

‘Aye, of course he will!’ Charles Stead’s laugh echoed the happiness in his daughter’s.

Julie walked slowly to the kitchen door and out into the autumn sunshine. There her family watched, and felt they pried, as she slowly pulled the confining pins from her hair and shook it free. The breeze from the orchard, like a lover’s fingers, gently lifted and gently let fall the golden strands.

She walked to the far end of the orchard, where brown shells of wasp-eaten fallens still lay underfoot. There was a headiness in the fermenting fragments, a promise of richness from decay. This place she had shared with Tom had an earthy abundance which brought ready recollections of him, of the life-force and vitality that seemed two men’s measure poured into one frame.

Her own joy too large to contain, she lifted her arms high, seemingly to increase her capacity for happiness, stretching sensually as if Tom saw, remembering the dimple that came to one cheek when he smiled broadly and the audacity of the message that could kindle in his eyes. She looked up through the curling, sap-starved leaves to the yellowing evening sky and made her private thanks to God. The flood-gate of unshed tears gave way now, but the tears were soft with celebration, not the bitter scalding tears of sorrow.

Later she brushed and braided her hair, pinning the golden plait in a new style, like a coronet over her forehead.

The need for celebration was with the whole family. The milking and feeding round were finished early, and they drove the three miles into the village to spread the news - but it was there before them.

Charles had sent young William posthaste and bright-eyed to make sure Tom’s father had heard, for it seemed that Tom had recorded Julie as his next of kin.

Henry Bright, with no women to hamper his decision, or stock to feed and water, had lost no time in taking William with him to celebrate. As the Stead trap entered the village, the news was called to them by Sarah Cox, who emerged from her front door, her skirts fairly making a stern-wave through little Coxes.

‘Glad for you, my dear,’ she called, ‘just heard. We’re all coming! Your young brother is in the Sir Robert Peel with Henry Bright.’

‘Our Will in a public house!’ Martha began.