The Dust That Falls From Dreams Page 19

  On 20th June she attended the funeral of the eighteen little children killed by bombers in Poplar, and sniffled into her handkerchief as the horses drew the flower-laden hearses by. She left a wreath in the town hall, along with some five hundred others. The stories were known all over the nation; how a father was able to identify his five-year-old daughter only by the Egyptian medal round her neck; how an engineer identified his headless daughter in the mortuary by means of a freshly sewn-on button; how of one child, nothing remained except her boots.

  There was no room in the church, so she did not hear the bishop read out the King’s message. The bishop said that after two thousand years of Christianity, it was inconceivable that war was now being waged against women and children. Mrs McCosh followed the hearses to East London Cemetery, and watched as the strong young sailors carried the tiny coffins to their communal grave. Then she went home and shut herself in her room, devastated all over again by what had happened to Myrtle.

  The next day Mrs McCosh went to Charing Cross Station and joined the sympathetic crowds who gathered there in order to welcome in the wounded. This she continued to do almost every day until the end of the war. She needed to have something to do, now that her daughters had left home, and there were so many horrible images and sounds that cluttered up and confused her mind.

  47

  Daniel Pitt to his Mother (3)

  No fixed address

  6 April 1918

  Ma chère maman,

  We are, as you know, in the middle of the most hideous German push. I like to think it’s their last desperate effort, but we’ve had to move airfields twice, and now we’re moving again. I have been sleeping in a leaky tent with a waterproof blanket that isn’t.

  But, chère maman! Light in the darkness! I have had the immense good luck to shoot down a Gotha! The Gothas come over quite often, but normally they are too high for us to reach them. This one was flying over the airfield quite low (11,000 ft) when I was coming back from an OP on my own, because the other two in my flight had developed dud engines and gone home early, and I nearly decided to run and hide in a cloud, because the damned things are impregnable. Discretion is the better part etc.

  But I didn’t, and I came down out of the sun, and got the observer in the back before he even saw me, overflew, immelmanned, and got the pilot on the second run. He managed to crash-land in a field and the bus didn’t catch fire, so we got the pilot out and the other two crew, but the pilot died a few hours afterwards. Mimimal blood on my hands, though: it could have been four. The Gotha is vast, but not as big as a Handley Page.

  And so…I have joined a tiny elite of Gotha-busting Hun-punchers! I am very fortunate, except that I had spent the previous day with the fitters, zeroing and fine-tuning my guns.

  Fluke (my squadron leader) has put me up for an MC, and then he sent off a letter to Paris to tell Pétain that he’d damned well better give me the Croix de Guerre.

  I can’t tell you, maman, what a stupendous rag and binge we had in the mess. My head will never be the same again.

  Ton fils dévoué et vainqueur,

  Daniel P.

  48

  Hutch (2)

  On 11 November 1918 Lloyd George read out the terms of the armistice to the assembled House of Commons, and then the entire House adjourned for a service at St Margaret’s. A copy of the terms was posted at eleven o’clock on the railings of Buckingham Palace, and a great swell of people assembled at the Victoria Memorial.

  The factories closed and the workers poured out into the streets. Anyone in uniform was hoisted onto people’s shoulders and jubilantly carried along, seldom in the direction they had been hoping to take. Bonfires blazed and fireworks crackled from Land’s End to Dover to Holyhead to Benbane Head to John o’Groats. Policemen had their helmets whisked off their heads and set on top of lamp posts at humorous angles. Soldiers overturned taxis and set them on fire. The crowds surged and cheered. At exactly eleven o’clock the maroons went off all over the country, and church bells swung vigorously and joyously in their towers. If there were no accordion to dance to, folk stood and clapped out a rhythm as youngsters and oldsters alike capered in the streets. The shop girls in Harrod’s opened the windows, climbed on the roofs, and waved their handkerchiefs and flags above Knightsbridge. A bus drove by bearing a sign ‘To Berlin, only a penny’, its overcrowded passengers singing and whooping.

  The King emerged on the balcony in the uniform of an admiral, accompanied by Queen Mary. The guard presented arms, a band played the national anthem, and after half an hour the King returned inside, only to be summoned forth again by an irresistible cry of ‘Good old King George! We want King George! We want King George!’ Someone began ‘Rule Brittannia’, and the whole crowd joined in. They sang the ‘Old Hundred’, and the Marseillaise. Somebody began the chant of ‘Speech! Speech! Speech!’ and the King thereupon made the shortest speech of his life, perfectly aware that nobody could hear it. The crowd sang ‘Now Thank We All Our God’ and afterwards the King joined in with the cheering. The crowd, drunk with relief and happiness, called for the King to re-emerge, and expressed no ill will when he didn’t, until at half past three he and the Queen drove out in an open carriage, accompanied only by four mounted policemen. They passed in a great circle down the Mall, the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, Queen Victoria Street, Holborn, Oxford Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, Trafalgar Square and back down the Mall. It rained but the people would not disperse. When it grew dark the King and Queen came back out on the balcony in a halo of electric light that dazzled the crowd.

  In the meantime the Prime Minister had made a speech in Downing Street, and then the people demanded another speech, so he had to come to the window and address them again. The cheers resounded to Westminster. ‘We have won a great victory,’ he declared, ‘and we are entitled to a bit of shouting.’

  The city suddenly blossomed with colour, like a garden in spring when the tulips come. The blackout curtains were torn down, so that lights blazed once more from windows. The French tricolour and flags from all over the Empire were hoisted on broomsticks and curtain poles lashed to chimneys and drainpipes. In every town and village the Boy Scouts were sent out on their bicycles to sound the all-clear for the last time. Incoherent fanfares blared from hunting horns and bugles, even inside people’s own houses. The pubs were drunk dry, and those that were not stayed open in defiance of their licences.

  The merrymaking continued all night. Military lorries laden with roaring loads of multinational servicemen lurched around the streets. The Savoy Hotel was overturned by officers of the Royal Air Force, led by a young ace waving a stupendously large French flag. It was a Monday, and the celebrations carried on all week. At 1 a.m. Mrs McCosh came home by taxi, dishevelled, wet, hungry and exhausted. She hammered on the door, unable to find her key, and Millicent in her night attire let her in, shocked to discover her mistress smelling distinctly of brandy. Mrs McCosh was mainly inebriated, however, by having seen the King so many times in one day. As for him, he spent the night writing letters of thanks to his ministers and to the personnel of the army, the navy and the air force.

  Amid those who cheered and danced in the streets there were many who neither cheered nor danced. There were those, wiser than before, who remembered with a sense of retrospective amazement that four years earlier they had taken part in scenes of celebration almost identical to these, when war broke out. Very nearly all of them, however, thought that the war had been worth it.

  On 7 November Hutch had gone with Lieutenant Simmons and seventy-one other ranks to establish an advanced GHQ in an abandoned train near Valenciennes, in the tiny village of Iwuy. On the 11th he had been one of the unlucky ones who had had to remain on guard duty whilst his comrades went on a spree to celebrate the news of the armistice.

  Nonetheless, a few days later he was on his way home on leave, in part a recognition of the extraordinary fact that he had survived the entire conflict in one regiment, in one theatre of war.<
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  As he travelled home across the English Channel he found that he did not really know how to feel. A part of him seemed numbed. He slept well at night but his dreams were populated by the dead. He saw their faces and heard their voices. Oddly enough, he often remembered more vividly the faces of dead enemies than those of his friends. It is impossible to forget the amazement on the face of a soldier who doubles over, grasping at the muzzle of your rifle as he tries to pull out the bayonet that you have thrust through his abdomen. The army’s policy of keeping you relentlessly busy even when you are exhausted had made the war go by in a blur of activity and extreme fatigue. He had mastered the soldier’s art of snatching a few seconds of profound sleep, whenever the opportunity arose, even when he was frozen and soaked, and lying on a bed of duckboards.

  There were many things he remembered with great pleasure, such as the sun glistening on frost shortly after dawn, or the brilliance of the stars on a clear night, or the way that birds sang louder when they were competing with guns, or how the larks sang high above when battle ceased, or the German tenor who used to sing a lullaby, or the wondrous black shadows thrown by the intense light of star shells. He remembered well-loved faces lit up in a dugout by the light of candle stubs, the smell of damp wood burning, the fountains of mud hurled up by shells, the mad few days of leave when he had lived at the rate of a day a minute. He had loved watching aeroplanes. He remembered the pleasure he had taken in witnessing the heroism and cheerfulness of the upper-class lady ambulance drivers who had deserted their comfortable estates in order to drive vehicles donated by their fathers, slogging through the squelching mire to carry the injured away to their makeshift hospitals that were always on the move because of the shifting boundaries of the front, and where they worked all night during offensives. Those women were the salt of the earth, in his estimation. He remembered too the wild and hilarious football matches behind the lines when they were resting, the ribald songs, the stupid jokes, the playfights. He remembered standing with Ash looking at a huge hole blown through the wooden sides of a bunker, and Ash saying, ‘Looks like we’ve got rats.’ He remembered an officer getting a large hamper from Fortnum & Mason, who had then been hit by a fragment of bomb from a Halberstadt when they had been relaxing in the relative safety and comfort of their billet at Mont St Eloi. ‘Sergeant, I bequeath you my hamper,’ the young officer had said, a moment before he died, and the warrant officers had shared it out, drinking the champagne out of tin mugs and proposing toasts to the memory of their benefactor. Hutch was still wearing his boots.

  Hutch had kept going not least because of his passion for Millicent. There was never a time when he was not thinking about seeing her again. He thought constantly of what he would say, and of the things that one day they would be able to do, after the war. He had spent time with her on every occasion that he’d been granted leave, spending less time with his family than he rightly should. Rosie, who tried to coordinate her leaves with Hutch, had admirably connived in this, finding false errands for Millicent that would allow her out of the house. Hutch had a steadily growing bundle of letters that Rosie had helped her to write, and read them over and over again even when they spoke only of the weather and of how you could hardly get sugar.

  Nonetheless Hutch was exhausted, so exhausted that he did not even know it himself. He was two stone below his natural weight, his bowels were either in flux or blocked solid, and often he ached all over without really knowing why. His rank had meant that he had had at all times to be tougher and more energetic than his men, because no soldier respects anyone above him who cannot do what he does, or does even better.

  He went home briefly to Walthamstow to check on his mother and father, and then set off by train for Eltham. He was feeling a little out of sorts, or ‘seedy’ as people liked to say in those days, but put it down to the strangeness of being at peace. Now that the 15th had passed, the universal joy and relief were beginning to be tempered by a mood of counting the cost, and there was an atmosphere of uncertainty about what might happen next.

  Something new and as deadly as the war had gathered momentum. It was said that six million had already died in India.

  Dressed in civvies, and wondering whether he should turn back and go home, he knocked on the kitchen door of The Grampians, and it was answered by Cookie, rolling pin in hand, with her sleeves rolled up to reveal her florid, powerful forearms. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ she cried, adding, ‘I was just making pear-and-apple pie.’

  ‘Good to see you, Cookie,’ said Hutch.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ cried Cookie, ‘Millie’ll be so pleased.’

  At the kitchen table, cradling large mugs of milky sweet tea, were the two policemen who called in on most days and were refortified by Cookie at elevenses, their feet already hot and a little swollen from pounding the beat. ‘This is Corporal Leonard Hutchinson,’ announced Cookie, ‘what’s going to marry our Millicent one of these days.’

  ‘I’m a sergeant now,’ said Hutchinson. ‘Everyone calls me Hutch.’

  ‘Not “Bunny” then,’ said one of the policemen drily.

  ‘Not yet,’ replied Hutch, ‘and no one’d better start either.’

  ‘Well, I’m Police Constable David Miller, and this here is Police Constable Ernest White.’

  ‘Known as Chalky and Dusty.’

  Hutch shook their hands, and quite suddenly a wave of nausea shot through him, causing him to buckle at the knees. He made a grab for the back of a chair and gasped, ‘Oh, Cookie, I’m not well.’

  The two policemen stood up and eased him down into a seat. Cookie ran to the tap to fetch him a drink of water. ‘Thank you,’ he said feebly, as he sipped at it. He set down the glass and put his hands to his temple. ‘My head,’ he complained.

  It felt as though his brain were swelling and pulsing inside his skull, and now his back and his arms and legs were beginning to hurt too. ‘I’d better get home,’ he said, and stood up, whereupon he fell unconscious to the floor, folding like a rag doll.

  ‘Bleedin’ heck,’ said Cookie, kneeling down next to him. She put her hand to his forehead and said, ‘He’s burning up. We’d better get Miss Rosie.’

  ‘Can’t be us. We’re not supposed to be here,’ said Dusty, so Cookie dashed out, and up the stairs, finding Rosie in the morning room, where, having taken the heavy family Bible from its lectern, she was reading it on her knees at the window seat.

  Rosie’s heart sank when she knelt down at Hutchinson’s side and realised immediately what the illness was. It had peaked just at the turn of the month, but hitherto her own family had avoided it by the simple expedient of not going out, apart from Ottilie, who was still down in Brighton nursing her Indian troops. She herself had returned the previous day from Netley, and had not been much exposed.

  ‘What is it, miss?’ asked Chalky, having forgotten that he and his companion had no particularly good reason for being in the kitchen of the house.

  ‘Spanish influenza,’ said Rosie, straightening up and trying to think quickly and precisely. ‘Fetch me three tea towels, will you, Cookie?’

  She bade the two policemen tie the tea towels across their faces and, then did so herself, saying, ‘It’s probably no use, but it’s better than nothing.’ She knew that if Hutchinson were to sneeze he would fill the air with microbial droplets. The two policemen heaved the body upstairs to the spare room, left their masks there, and then retired to the kitchen to recover their breath and drink another pint of tea. Rosie had told them to wash their hands thoroughly, and now they and Cookie sat in gloom, smelling somewhat carbolical, speculating about the possibly fateful results of their encounter.

  ‘Mostly gets the very young and the old, don’t it?’ asked Dusty.

  ‘And the sick,’ said Cookie, ‘and them that’s weak. That’s why it’s got so many soldiers, they’re that wore out.’

  ‘God help us,’ said Chalky.

  When Millicent found out from Cookie that her fiancé was in the house, gravely ill, co
ntradictory emotions of joy and anxiety overwhelmed her. Rosie had decided that she was going to look after the patient on her own and that she and Hutch would both be in strict quarantine. She soaked towels in Lysol and hung them from the walls and from the architrave of the door. She made Millicent stand in the doorway with a muslin cloth across her mouth and nose, and did not permit her to come one step closer. She stood there with her face in her hands, whimpering and repeating, ‘He will be all right, won’t he, miss?’ until Rosie wondered how may more times she was going to have say, ‘I really don’t know, Millicent.’

  Mrs McCosh was not pleased. Refusing to wear anything across her face, she positioned herself down the corridor and expected Rosie to have a conversation with her by calling from the doorway.

  ‘You must get him out straight away and down to an infirmary,’ she instructed her daughter.

  ‘What infirmary? The Cottage Hospital?’ replied Rosie. ‘You can’t take him into a hospital, he’ll infect the other patients, and a lot of them will die.’

  ‘But he’s going to kill us all!’ cried Mrs McCosh.

  ‘Stay away, Mama, and he’ll only kill me.’

  ‘How can you say such dreadful things? Don’t you mind dying? He’s not even a gentleman. What do you think people will say when they hear you have been immured in a room with a man to whom you are not even related?’

  ‘He was Ash’s best friend,’ said Rosie, bridling, ‘and I’ve spent the whole war looking after men who weren’t gentlemen.’

  ‘Heaven knows what it might have done to your morals,’ replied her mother, whereupon Rosie went back into the room and re-emerged with a long-necked Wedgwood vase, which she hurled at her mother with extraordinary force, so that it shattered on the wall, next to her head. As Mrs McCosh looked at her, wideeyed with astonished outrage, Rosie said coldly, ‘What do you say of the morals of someone who did practically nothing for four years while millions of young men died?’ Then she went back into the sickroom, slamming the door behind her. Mrs McCosh sat down in a chair on the landing and said to herself, ‘But I got a gun after Myrtle was killed. I went to welcome the wounded at Charing Cross. I had Belgian ladies to tea. I took fruit to the Cottage Hospital.’ She would never have dared confront her own mother in such way when she had been young, and now she was quite uncertain as to how to comport herself. It was true that she had greatly provoked her own mother, but now she was helpless in the face of her own angry adult daughter. One thing she knew was that it was no good expecting her husband to take her side. ‘I am quite alone,’ she said, and decided to write to the King.