Mary Russell's War Page 6

  No, that was not possible. If invasion threatened, the citizens of England would pour out across the countryside like ants, armed with old shotguns and pitchforks, rallying to throw the invaders off the white cliffs and fill the shingle below with their bodies. Not that shotguns and pitchforks could do much good against the sorts of guns the—

  With that thought, my steps slowed, then halted. I heeled around to face the open view, and listened hard, mouth slightly open. That same pulse, sounding in my ears.

  Only it was not a pulse. What I had heard the night before, what I heard again now, came not from within my own body. Nor did it rise from the Beachy Head cliffs, where—oh, dullard that you are, Mary!—last night at dusk, the shingle beach would have been dry as could be.

  That sound was coming from a hundred miles away. The sound pattering against my eardrums, now as the night before, was the voice of War: the ceaseless, massive throb of artillery barrage.

  In a patch of hell on the other side of that calm blue water, boys not much older than I lay dying into the French earth.

  9 February

  My blessed solitude, broken only by the occasional presence of Mrs Mark inside and Patrick Mason out, could not last. Indeed, I was fortunate to be granted as many days as I was. But in the end, my aunt descended upon Sussex, bringing with her many trunks and much complaint. Unfortunately, her arrival happened to coincide with the end of a string of fair, dry days. Gales and occasional hard showers ended my freedom to wander the countryside, or as much of the countryside as I can manage before my various ill-healed injuries demand rest (I was near collapse last week when I finally made it home, and spent the next day in bed.) The rain and her presence conspire to keep me inside, well supplied with reading material from the shelves of the sitting room. The books here are old, but entertaining—my mind still balks at anything resembling work.

  While on the topic of light reading, I must say that I found this month’s instalment of Valley of Fear oddly disturbing. Not due to the accumulations of plot, although the tale does seem to be going in many directions at once. No, what troubles me is the passivity of the heroine. This vivacious young woman has been assigned one suitor, whom she dislikes and fears, then falls beneath the spell of a hot-tempered and troublingly pushy young newcomer. Stories such as this seem designed to drive a reader into contemplation of herself and her future, but the thought of coming under the influence of a handsome young man with a good singing voice and “pretty, coaxing ways” causes me to feel even more uneasy than the idea of being kidnapped by a “Young Lochinvar” with a pistol. I may be more intelligent than many girls my age, but evidence suggests that intelligence alone does not render one immune to love’s stupidity.

  A day or two after reading The Strand, I made my way down to the stables for a conversation with Patrick. Mother’s farm manager—my farm manager—is a man with little formal schooling and a great deal of what Father called “hard sense”. I sat on a bench with my back to the stables door, his old mare dozing at my shoulder, and told him about my concerns. He may have been embarrassed at the unwonted intimacy of my questions, but since he was working on some piece of machinery, he could bury his face in its gears and pretend not to hear me. Until I asked him directly if he thought I should worry about the danger of marrying a man with pretty ways.

  He made a sound very like one of his horses when it gets straw dust in its nose, and told me that I was too sensible for that. But I persisted, asking him what a person could do to ensure they were not in a position of idiotic vulnerability.

  He shoved his face even further into the innards of the machine, and mumbled something. “Pardon?” I asked. “I said,” he replied, “seems to me that it’s the girls without interests in life what gets into trouble.”

  Interests in life. It is true: a lack of goal leaves a person as directionless as a sailing ship without wind. What I need is a goal: to enable me to overlook the caustic presence of my aunt, and to take me beyond my present state of emptiness.

  Mother and Father both expected me to go to University. I am fifteen years old. With every week of idleness, I fall further behind my peers. This must stop. Time to by-pass the sections of book-shelf that hold the pretty novels and essays, and turn to the meat of the matter.

  It seems to me I saw a Latin grammar there, somewhere.

  16 February

  February is not a time of year where one may easily wander the Downlands with a Latin text in hand. If the pages are not blown asunder, they are rendered into sodden masses of pulp, and in either event, are difficult to manipulate by half-frozen fingers.

  So—needs must—I have made my scholar’s residence in the warmth and dry of the stables, where my aunt never ventures. Patrick is a pleasantly unobtrusive companion, who does little more than murmur a greeting on his way to and fro. The main drawback is the dimness of the further reaches, making for an oscillation between the bright front of the stables and the warm depths of it.

  Three days ago I was surprised to hear voices approach. I hastily gathered my things, preparing to flee into the dark, but neither voice seemed to belong to my aunt. Unless she was a silent partner to the conversation—unlikely—it was Patrick and someone else.

  The someone else was a boy. He halted just inside the door, startled by my sudden emergence from the straw-lined manger. Patrick stopped too, having clearly forgotten that I would be there.

  “Ah,” he said. “Miss Mary. Pardon the interruption, we’ll be gone, I’d just—”

  “Oh heavens no, you’re not disturbing me. In fact, you’re saving me from the imperfect subjunctive.” I looked at the boy, and Patrick made introductions.

  “Miss Mary, this is one of your neighbours, Second Lieutenant Thomas Saunders,” he said. “Thomas, Miss Mary Russell, what lives in the house.”

  I was surprised, as the young man seemed little older than I. Also shorter. I slumped a bit, having found that males in general and young ones in particular regard height in a female somewhat intimidating, and thrust out my hand.

  “How d’you do?” I said, a greeting he echoed.

  “Thomas is off to France in a few days,” Patrick said. “A short leave before he goes to join his regiment.”

  “I wanted to come see how the horses were doing,” the young man explained. “I used to spend most of the summers here as a boy, helping Mr Mason with the horses. He sometimes let me drive them, when I’d helped him hitch them on the cart.”

  “Oh!” I exclaimed. “I remember you—Tommy, with a sister named…Mattie, was it?”

  “That’s right, though she wants to be called Matilda now. And I remember you—you had the funny brother who knew everything, didn’t you? And the uncle who made those wizzer what-you-call-ems. Sky lanterns.”

  “But…” I stopped. Mattie had been a little younger than I, but I’d have sworn that Tommy was only two years older. A seventeen year-old officer, on his way to the Front? I thought of the distant rumble of guns, and shuddered.

  I must have been staring at him, because Patrick cleared his throat. “I’ll just let—”

  “Would you like a cup of tea, Tom—er, Lieutenant Saunders?”

  “Please, call me Tommy.”

  I fled to the kitchen, finding it blessedly empty of my aunt’s presence. I managed to assemble three mugs of tea and a plate of rather hacked-up seed cake, plus a large wedge of cheese and some uneven bread-and-butter sandwiches, and carried the laden tray out to the stables.

  Men and boys alike tend to overlook the looks of one’s kitchen efforts in favour of quantity, and it was no less so with Patrick and Tommy. They drank and ate, and we talked. About what, I cannot remember, really, although it is now scarcely forty-eight hours later.

  We talked about normality, I suppose. Horses and shortages, childhood and California, his sister and my brother. Other than an awkward expression of condolence on his part, death was ignored, both those in the past and the deaths taking part across the Channel. Under the effects of food, dr
ink, and conversation, Tommy’s stilted manner faded, and his face resumed something of the animation I remembered.

  He went home soon thereafter, but he came back yesterday, and again today. We sat in the stables while Patrick worked, talking about his school and my problems with Latin and where the world was going, and what we wanted to do when it was over. Over those three conversations, his face seemed to undergo an oddly divided change: he began to look both younger, more like to the boy I had known, yet at the same time older, more assured.

  My mother had been fond of him, I remembered. I could picture her laughing at one of his antics. I was hit by the sudden image of this young officer, half a dozen years ago, handing her a rough bouquet of flowers from his mother’s garden.

  “Do you need anything?” I interrupted, causing him to look a question at me. “I mean, a book to take with you, or a packet of tea? Some warm socks perhaps?”

  In the end, he took a small book of poetry and the rest of the cheese. And when he left, he gave me a kiss on the cheek, and pressed my hand in his.

  We both promised to write.

  23 February

  Each morning, the young son of the village postmistress comes cycling up the lane to bring us, in addition to the various requests from housekeeper and aunt, the previous day’s edition of The Times. My aunt seems to think this inappropriate reading material, given my sex and age, but it is the newspaper my parents used to read, and the font is familiar to me (though the quality of the paper itself seems to have slipped somewhat, as well as the quantity, under Wartime shortages.)

  It is, I admit, a more challenging way to follow the world’s events than the San Francisco Chronicle used to be. That paper’s preference for sensational headlines made for a more entertaining experience, more concerned with daring criminal exploits, rum-smuggling, and the abduction of young girls than about the War dead and the dry decisions of Crown Courts.

  Still, even the Times acknowledge the need for the softer interests among the hard edges of international affairs. For example, the Queen has been visiting her “Work for Women” Fund workrooms, a training college where unemployed girls are taught the skills of dressmaking, ironing, and kitchen. Only a few, it seems, are deemed capable of learning a clerk’s skills.

  Elsewhere, a schoolboy of 13 years has taken ten shillings of his choir money and set off for the Front, sleeping rough and carrying luggage for tips. When retrieved, he was disappointed to hear that he cannot enlist as a drummer boy for another year.

  In the meantime, the King has been inspecting a collection of motor ambulances at the Palace. They, too, are on their way to the Front, under the auspices of the Red Cross. Posters urge enlistment, shops arrange goods on sparse shelves, there is talk of gathering scrap metal and iron fences to be melted down into armament—while half the population of Britain sits at home and feeds the children.

  Why are women permitted the needle, even the type-writing machine, but not the rifle? Surely chivalry is a dangerous luxury when the enemy is on the other side of a narrow strait of water? Perhaps, if the pressure of having more and more of the men away in the trenches builds, some leeway may open up, that the “gentler sex” may be granted the right, if not to fire a rifle across no-man’s land, then at least to drive to the aid of wounded riflemen in those Red Cross ambulances?

  My farm’s motorcar—my motorcar, much good will it do me—currently sits upon blocks of wood at the back of the stables. However, even if I were to take it down, fill the tyres, and get it running, I should then come up against petrol shortages. (Oh, why did I not insist that Father teach me to drive, once my feet could touch the controls?) Still, there are motors occasionally to be seen in the village. One of them belongs to the local doctor, who is to be seen, pressed up against the windscreen with a worried look on his face. This has given me a plan: I shall invent an ailment to get in to see him, and tell him he needs a chauffeur. (Chauffeuse?)

  The actual skills of driving will no doubt be quickly learned—Patrick will teach me, when confronted with the fait accomplis of my new position—and once I am expert enough, I can put my name forward for the Front.

  All sorts of men drive. How hard could it be?

  2 March

  Today is the second day of March, with no sign of the month’s Strand. February’s issue did not come until the third of the month, and the post seems only to be getting slower. Perhaps the magazine should forswear the serialisation of its pieces for the duration of War, in consideration of its frustrated readers.

  Similarly, I received two letters from Lieutenant Saunders on the same day, though they were written a week apart. I found it difficult to decide whether I should read both at once, or whether I should wait a week for the second, so as to duplicate his chronology across the Channel. In the end, I compromised and waited a day to read the second one—by which time two more had arrived.

  I shall probably now receive nothing more from him for a month.

  Which causes me to wonder if the post office could be to blame for my lack of correspondence from Dr Ginsberg? She wrote to me every week, when I first left California, although again they arrived in fits and starts. However, I have had nothing since a letter dated on my birthday, 2 January. That one I did answer, briefly. Perhaps she has interpreted my lack of replies as a wish to be left alone? Or, it has also occurred to me that that one of the ships sunk by the Germans could have held my piece of Royal mail, so I wrote again.

  Perhaps I ought to send a third, just to be certain that one of them reaches San Francisco? After that, if there is no reply, I shall have to accept that ours were not the close ties I had thought; that her friendship with Mother, followed by her professional care of me after the accident, is not sufficient call on her affections. She is, after all, a busy woman.

  If a ship bearing my letter did go down, it would not be the only one. Submarines prowling the waters off Beachy Head have sunk a number of ships in recent weeks. It must be terrifying to look over the rails and see a periscope sticking up from the waters, followed by the track of a torpedo coming at the hull. One of the ships—the Thordis—claims to have made a run directly at the U-boat and damaged it, but either it sank or it limped off because it did not wash up on our shores.

  Not that I would know. Although my walks have got longer, as my stamina has improved, I have avoided the coast since my one time there, not wishing to see doomed ships or hear the sound of the guns. Instead, when the weather permits, I go northerly out of the Downs and into the Weald, where the trees shelter one from distant rumbles. Last week the weather took a turn for the better, Thursday dawning surprisingly warm beneath a cloudless sky. I slid my book in one pocket and some bread and cheese in another, and before midday I reached the Michelham Priory.

  I had come across mention of this ancient moated house, formerly monastic and now private, in one of Mother’s histories of Sussex. It reminded me of the moat that surrounds the house in Valley of Fear, and I took a fancy to see it. As I drew near, I saw that the resemblance was thin, since the Priory moat is quite a distance from the house walls, not directly below its windows as events in the story require. Nonetheless, the place looks intriguing. Perhaps another day I shall knock at the door.

  Is it a sign of maturity that I noticed restoration on portions of the structure? I doubt that last summer I should have noticed such a thing. My parents attended a Christmas party at Michelham one year, and I remember Father’s concern over the heavy hands of the restorers. Today, this seems a frivolous sort of worry, when a million men are at each other’s throats just over the horizon, but a person grasps what small piece of normality she can, these days.

  So, I agree with my father: I hope the Priory’s restoring hands are gentle.

  9 March

  This month’s instalment of The Valley of Fear finally came (two days ago!) although I have to admit, it has not done much to clarify the mystery around the story’s murder. I could see from the very first that any victim whose head was all but ob
literated by a shot-gun is a victim whose identity the reader should question, and with this current episode, one is led to suspect that the man McMurdo, far from being the criminal and bounder he appears, has another purpose behind his presence in the Valley. In the hands of a more cunning writer, one might begin to suspect a sort of double-bluff, but I fear Mr Conan Doyle is too straight-forward for that.

  As for “Birlstone Manor,” even with the Michelham Priory off my list of candidates, Sussex has proven rich in alternatives. Brief research through my mother’s collection of Sussexiana has given me a plethora of moated houses, the investigation of which will have to wait until the roads have dried enough to permit use of a bicycle. I was surprised at first, until I reflected on this part of England: as enemies from Norman French to the Kaiser’s Boche well know, the south coast is Britain’s open underbelly, and it would well behove any king to have a string of fortified allies between the south coast and London. War is not a new thing to this land.

  As to the current horrors, The Times informs me that 12,369 re-dyed old sweaters have been sent to the Front, along with countless socks and other bits of knitwear, for the benefit of 12,369 apparently desperate soldiers. In the meantime, the Bishop of London has dedicated a motor coffee stall on its way to France, that he might promote temperance among the serving men: heaven forbid that men clothed in mud-soaked and ill-dyed jumble-sale rejects should be handed a mug of alcohol to warm their bones.

  Regular articles on “Daily Life in the Army” describe a continuous assault of artillery on the nerves, the deadly skill of German snipers, and an omnipresent rattle of machine guns, while wounded officers retreat to the luxury of Woburn Abbey and Blenheim Palace for their recuperation.