A Fox Under My Cloak Page 10

  Tea was served by a man-servant in a large room of inlaid furniture with spidery legs, glass cases holding china and other valuables, and a polished steel hearth wherein enormous logs blazed. There were lovely water-colour paintings on the walls. In another large room, which he heard mentioned as the Ballroom, were rows of beds, and men in civilian tweeds and officer uniforms sitting on them smoking. After one glance, Phillip fled. The beds, he learned, were occupied by sick and wounded officers; the châtelaine had turned her mansion into a private hospital, paying all the expenses herself. Two of the nurses were her daughters, others their friends. He had no feeling of being over-awed, as he had been when visiting Aunt Victoria at Epsom, for here everything seemed very free and easy. The countess was very natural, he thought, and just like any other old lady—except that she seemed more energetic, and to the point. She wore a floppy old blue hat with a riband round it, a man’s upright starched linen collar, and a black sort of man’s coat. He was not in the least afraid of her. Her husband, the earl, was at the front. She asked him where he lived; and remembering that Mr. Purley-Prout, the scoutmaster, had addressed the Countess of Mersea, when she had come to visit the camp, as “Mar’m”, Phillip said “mar’m” now and again, instead of “m’lady”. Then, on learning that she had known his first colonel, the Earl of Findhorn, Phillip lost his tongue.

  “Do come and see us again before you go, won’t you? And when you are stronger, you must tell me about Findhorn, a dear friend and schoolfellow of Cheshire.”

  Phillip said he would while thinking that he must avoid it by all means in his power, since the countess obviously believed that he was the friend of the Earl of Findhorn, and posh. When next his turn came to visit the Big House he pretended to have a headache; and went instead to visit the epileptics in their room where they played billiards and snooker. The soldiers were welcome any time during the day.

  Among the inmates he had made friends with a man who had misty blue eyes and fair hair. This man had already given him some lessons in billiards: how to hold a cue properly, resting your left hand on the table and making a bridge with your fingers, how to strike with the cue steadily, not jerkily, or you would tear the cloth and likely send the ball bouncing heavily over the cush onto the floor.

  When he arrived at the epileptics’ wing a concert was being given by the patients. A contralto was singing on the platform When you come down the Vale, Lad, clutching her music at arm’s length before her, while another woman tried to keep time on the piano. The contralto was just singing the words There’s music in the air when a third woman got up in the middle of the hall, gave a wailing cry and collapsed, and was carried off while the song proceeded. Two others followed the same way before the last verse, and then the singer herself had an attack, while the accompanist hastily beat out God Save the King.

  “Funny,” said Phillip’s misty-eyed friend. “But When you come down the Vale, Lad often sets off the female patients. Do you notice that there is a similarity between the sort of cooing bellow of the contralto and the cooing or moaning of the patient before she goes down? There’s a reason for it, to my way of thinking.”

  “Does it have to do with sympathetic vibrations? You know, Caruso was supposed to have shattered the chandelier once in Covent Garden?”

  “You’ve said it!” cried the other, putting down his billiard cue. “You’ve got it! I advanced that theory to Dr. Shufflebotham, you know, the one who sees to you fellers, but he pooh-poohed it. Ah, what does he know what we have to go through, in our minds, before we feel a fit coming on? In the old days, they used to pummel the patients, to get them out of it, to make them fight the attack. Some used to recommend dousin’ ’em with water. Barbarous old times, weren’t they? Can you imagine it?”

  “I should think I can! Why, in our battalion, a chap…” and Phillip recounted the story of the man whose appendix was about to burst being given a No. 9 pill and duty. Only this time he varied the details. “He lies buried in the Brasserie cemetery, by the cross-roads between Vierstraat and Elzenwalle, at this very moment!”

  “I know, you needn’t tell me, the whole world’s gone off its rocker. There’s a soldier here now, who has fits. He was at Mons, and never had so much as a quaver before the war. He was blown up by a shell. ‘Dusty’ Miller, they call him. He lies in bed next to me, and often I hear him crying. He bites through his sheets, not in a fit, mark you, but just lying in bed. But the doctor says it is a variant of epilepsy. Can you beat that?”

  Phillip wondered how he could beat it, while he tried to pot the red. Then he stood up. “I’ll tell you one thing, old chap!” (He never knew his friend’s name.) “And that is this! No-one who has not been out in France can possibly imagine what it is really like. If you read the papers, with their humorous descriptions of our chaps, and the ‘humourless Hun’ opposite, you’ll get no idea at all!” He bent down to do the stroke. The red went wide. “Curse, I can’t get the angle.” He stood up. “I suppose, in the old days, cannon balls used to bounce off positions, like these balls. Nowadays they don’t bounce off any more. They strike home, and the chips fly—chips of flesh and bone, I mean. And the worst feeling of all is not the fear, but the loneliness. I don’t mean that we have no pals, but——”

  “That’s all right, old man, I understand. You’ve done your bit, so take it easy!”

  Another interesting place to visit was the back-door of the boozer, as O’Casey called the village pub. They weren’t allowed to sell drinks to soldiers in hospital blue, and it was war-time closing anyway, during the day, explained O’Casey, an old sweat of the Liverpool Regiment, who took Phillip. “Say nothing at all, at all.” “Not a word,” replied Phillip, paying for the drinks of hot Irish whiskey with water and sugar in the kitchen. It was a wry taste, he didn’t really want it, but it was the thing to do. He didn’t want the clay pipe he bought, either, on O’Casey’s advice, with the twopenny roll of thick twist; but he smoked it, until he was sick. Then O’Casey got him some brandy, to cure the sickness, and had one himself to keep him company. “A rookie ’as allus to buy his way in the army, and you’re with a real so’jer now, my lad,” said O’Casey.

  Phillip wondered how he could get rid of O’Casey, without hurting the old fellow’s feelings. The Liverpool Irishman, who had long grey-black hair brushed back over a nobbly forehead, and a cunning rather lined but handsome face, one night in the dormitory did it himself. O’Casey was telling funny stories, chuckling as he spoke, of his adventures in Dublin and Liverpool, and stories of the army, too. One was about a soldier in India who got the “doolally tap”, according to his mates. His madness took the form of crawling about on hands and knees, examining every little bit of paper he came across. He even pursued this peculiarity, said O’Casey, across the barrack square while the Commander-in-Chief of India and the Viceroy themselves with their ladies had come a-visiting the Colonel. “Put that pore feller in hospital,” cried no less a man than the Viceroy himself. In hospital the soldier continued to crawl about on hands and knees, examining the most minute pieces of paper. At last, as a harmless lunatic, he was discharged; whereupon he walked upright, and passing the guard-room on his way out, waved his discharge and said: “I’ve found that little bit of paper I was looking for!”

  O’Casey laughed ferociously, revealing teeth brown with chewing quids of thick twist. “He was a clever sod, to think that one out!” The word sod was frequently used among the old soldiers in the dormitory, so, when the laughter had stopped, Phillip called across, meaning it as a compliment, “You are a clever old sod yourself, O’Casey!” whereupon without a moment’s hesitation the Liverpool Irishman leapt out of bed, ran across the floor in nightshirt and bare feet, and bending over Phillip’s face, his clenched fists an inch off Phillip’s nose, cried harshly, all humour gone from his attitude, “I’ll batter yer head off if you insult me mother! How dare you call me a sod! Me mother was an honest woman!” with such intense fury that Phillip shut his eyes, awaiting blows on his face,
after saying that he was sorry. O’Casey went back to bed, just as the lights went out, muttering and spluttering about rookies who had not yet got their foreskins back daring to tell him, who had gone through every campaign from Chitral and Oomdurman, North-West Frontier, South Africa, and Mons, who his father was.

  Phillip went no more with this ferocious joker to drink Irish whiskey in the kitchen of the little pub. He had already given clay pipe and black twist to Jules, the Belgian blessé, who seemed much more cheerful since he had had a parcel, containing socks, scarf, tin of café-au-lait, plum cake, chocolate, raisins, figs, a book of the convent at Thildonck with pictures, a pair of mittens, a red flannel chest-protector, and what he liked best of all, a small crucifix, silver on ebony, of the kind Phillip wore.

  *

  While he was at Alderley Edge, Phillip had letters from Desmond, Mrs. Bigge, Mrs. Todd, and others, welcoming him back. One was in the meticulously neat writing of Tom Ching, on Admiralty writing paper. It might have been written, he thought, by a tender male nurse. It described the wonderful times he, his dear old school chum, would give Phillip when he was safely home: the walks he would take him, holding his arm in memory of old days; the fatted ox that would be killed to welcome him home, etc. Tom Ching even wrote the last word on every page twice, as a carry-over word, to aid the eyesight, apparently.

  This letter, slightly nauseating, told Phillip only that Tom Ching was still after his sister Mavis. And Phillip had never forgotten the occasion when Tom Ching had spat in his eye, and run away. Ugh! What a creature! He threw the letter in the fire.

  At the end of a fortnight he was passed Fit for Light Duty after a brief listening-patrol by the old doctor with his brown wooden stethoscope. The examination was about as useful as a listening-patrol, because the doctor, whose white moustache was yellow with nicotine, was wheezing away all the time one end of the stethoscope was on Phillip’s ribs and the other end in the doctor’s ear. The next day he was driven into the town for a medical board, with several others, including O’Casey. Jules, Jacques and Pierre waved in the doorway, beside Matron and the nurses. In an ambulance they rode to Manchester, to the Ancoats Military Hospital. On the way they passed some of the new Kitchener’s Army, in odd blue uniforms with red forage caps worn more or less flat and square on their heads. They marched with yellow Japanese rifles at the slope, and what a slope! That rag-tag-bob-tailed lot, remarked Phillip to O’Casey, what use would they be—rookies!

  “Thank God for the Navy, O’Casey.”

  “Don’t let me hear you take That Name in vain, my friend,” replied O’Casey, grimly. “Me mother was a religious woman, and taught me at her knee.”

  Phillip noticed that O’Casey now had a walking-stick, and appeared to be, as he declared to Dr. Shufflebotham, a proper cripple from rheumatism. He had a rosary, and was telling his beads while he awaited his turn for the medical board. He went into the room for this before Phillip, his face all twisted up, like his walk; and came out scowling a minute or two later, saying with a hoarse laugh as he threw the stick on a table, “Anyone want this ould shillelagh? Only don’t let anyone, for love of the Blessed Mother of God, take it in there wid him before that lot of ould sods! Bad ’cess to it, it brought me no luck at all, at all!”

  He cackled with laughter as he held up a little paper bag. “Blime, the ould counthry’s sound at heart, boys! An old geyser in there gimme this bag o’ suckers, to keep me little tootsies warm all the way to Frisby Dyke!” Then with his old swagger O’Casey picked up his bundle of possessions, clapped his shapeless service cap on his head, and walked out, puffing a Woodbine.

  Phillip was given three weeks’ leave, a little bag of bull’s-eye sweets (“This is from the Lancashire Methodists’ Fund for Soldier Comforts”) and a railway voucher to Randiswell. For some reason, after all the prolonged anticipation and hope, the sight of this name made his heart sink. Rather tremulously he wrote out a telegram in the sooty station: ARRIVING TONIGHT PHILLIP.

  Chapter 7

  HOMECOMING

  IT felt strange to be wearing a tunic again, kilt and hose of hodden grey under the bullet-ripped greatcoat with nearly two feet of its length missing, and the old glengarry. He had been given a ten-shilling note on production of his pay-book, but no food; and since there was no dining-car on the London train, he sat in his corner seat in the empty carriage until the arrival at St. Pancras. Then, in what seemed to be a very lonely and uncaring London, by Underground to Charing Cross and the train home. How drab and empty everything looked. At Randiswell he got out, and crossed over the wooden bridge. A new porter took his voucher without a word as he walked through the door into the waiting-room where the newspapers were still displayed on trestle tables by the coal fire in the grate. Ah, there sitting on the edge of the trestle table was the same old tom cat with the sulky bee-face and torn ears that he remembered when, for a change, he had caught the train to the office on the S.E. and C.R. line from Randiswell. The cat was a great dog-fighter, waiting on the corner of the trestle table to spring on the back of any dog, no matter how big, which dared to enter the waiting-room. Paws round dog’s neck, the cat clung and bit and ripped with its hind claws as the dog rushed away with its unwanted jockey. Then, dog seen off, the cat dismounted and walked slowly back to its perch on the newspaper table.

  “Hullo, Moggy, how are you? Remember me?”

  The hunched-up object did not move so much as a flip of its ear. Phillip continued to rub its neck until his persistence drew a tiny, rusty purr. Ha, the cat remembered him after all! “Puss-puss, good old puss-puss!”

  Randiswell looked dull. There was the flashy Railway Tavern at the corner of the High Road; Longstaff’s the grocer’s opposite, next to the sweet-stuff shop; then Hawkins the barber’s, beside the boot shop; Soal the green grocer’s, then a length of advertisement hoarding, stretching to the newsvendor’s shop; Chamberlain’s the butcher; Hern’s the grocer’s. All looking so much smaller than he had remembered them. He walked past them all, hoping not to be recognised; and saw no familiar faces. Then more hoardings—ah, there it was still, the great dark stare of Kitchener, black moustache much wider than the face, finger pointing. Your Country needs YOU. He hurried on, his gaze on the pavement. At the corner, the baker’s; then the curve of Charlotte Road, with its chestnut trees, and houses leading up from steps, all nearly hidden behind unclipped privet hedges.

  Charlotte Road seemed much shorter, somehow. Past Mr. Bolton’s house; past Aunt Dorrie’s; past, with furtive glances, the blind-drawn front of the Wallaces’ house opposite. A glance, half uncertain, a little unsure, at the upper window of Mrs. Neville’s flat. No-one sitting at the window; no large white face, no wave, no smile. With controlled agitation he turned the corner into Hillside Road. How short it was. The great mass of the red brick Modern School that had enclosed the poor little West Kent Grammar School looked very square and near and brick-heavy on the Hill. And how small, really, was the grassy slope below the sheep-fold, where once the toboggan runs had seemed so long in the snow-light of winter. With a start he thought that the School might be a larger Hospice on the Wytschaete Ridge. Soon the flares would be rising, twilight was coming, braziers would be showing red along the line of bunkers in the wood. O, why had he come back? something cried inside him, as he walked slowly past house after house. He was about to go by No. 6, when he saw Mrs. Todd was beckoning at the window. He waited reluctantly, then the door opened.

  “Phillip, Phillip, welcome back! Here, give me a kiss, dear!” Mrs. Todd hugged him. He pushed slightly against the hug. “Now, Phillip, your mother will be waiting. She told us you were coming! We are all so proud of you! See the flag, dear? That’s for you!” The big, kindly woman kissed him again, he felt the tears on his cheek, but pretended not to notice them. A printed Union Jack, about three feet by two, hung from its stick tied on the balcony. “We’re all proud of you, Phillip.”

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Todd.”

  He saw a flag outside “Sailor” Jen
kins’ house, but, thankfully, no round small red face of Mrs. Jenkins behind the lace curtains. Blank as usual, almost grim, was the front of No. 9, the Groats, above the hearth-stoned steps. Mr. Groat, taciturn headmaster of the Deptford Council School, who had coached him for his scholarship: his boyish tears, he couldn’t learn, while all Mr. Groat said, after long and ponderous silences, was “Think, boy! Think!” He passed by quickly; and saw two flags sticking out from under Mrs. Bigge’s bedroom windows. One was the Royal Standard, as on the Rolls-Royce bonnet of the King at the Hazebrouck inspection, the other a Union Jack. And there was dear old Mother Bigge gesticulating at her downstairs window. Up it went, the same old window-cord squeal.

  “Welcome home, Phillip! We’re all so very very proud of you! Now mind you go straight in and give Mother a big hug! She’s so excited. Be patient, I told her, Phillip’ll come all in good time. You see, dear, I didn’t want Mother to get one of her bilious attacks! Now go on in with you!” and down squealed the window.

  He stopped a moment at his gate, seeing the letter-marks of its old name painted over, and the brass number 11 in their place. He hesitated before pushing open the gate, and having done so, was most careful, even anxious, to close it quietly, restraining the coiled black spring. On tip-toe he walked under the glassed-in porch; more hesitation, struggling with a destructive wish to go away, to remain cold within himself, and alone, for ever and ever.

  Feeling wan, he sat down on the brick wall above Mrs. Bigge’s alley-way. There was her dustbin down below, just the same. Why was it all so disappointing, so drab, so—colourless? Why had the neighbours put out those awful flags? Why, O why, had Mother told them that he was coming home?

  Then, as with thud of a bullet, the idea struck him that he had no right to be home. Peter Wallace, and David, and Nimmo were the ones to be proud of. They were brave, they were heroes, they had stood by one another, by their friends; when the Bavarians had broken through they had died fighting, in that night of burning farm and windmill and cornstack at Messines.