A photograph taken in the garden showed Rachel as a grave-looking women with a high forehead and an abundance of hair. Clara was fifteen, her sister Emma fourteen, and their brother John sixteen. Emma had at this time the same tormented eyes as her father, and a distortion of the mouth which was due as much to having moved as because she was horrified at being fixed for ever at this time with people to whom, she said afterwards to Clara, she did not feel she belonged. But her eyes stayed still and were perfectly caught, vainly trying to grasp a vision that would not come to her. In physique she was slight like her father, but grew taller in the next few years. Her look suggested that she had already experienced much suffering, and would spend the rest of her life trying to forget the ordeal. ‘She had seen none at all,’ Clara commented, ‘though what she appeared to feel might have been a preview of what had yet to happen.’
The cardboard boxes devoted to John were marked NOT TO BE OPENED – EVER! But traces of broken sealing wax showed that they had been examined more than once by Clara. There were school reports, textbooks, letters sent home, a picture postcard from Cromer (‘seashells good, weather bad’) as well as a cloth cycling map marking a tour through Belgium, on which each night-stop was shown in such heavy pencil that the name of the place was almost obliterated.
Letters from the trip were tied up with a Baedeker guidebook that was falling to pieces. After Ostend, on the way out, John stayed the night at Dixmude: ‘A level run of nearly thirty kilometres along a poor road of paving stones which can’t be much good for my old bone-shaker. We passed many dairy farms – Lord, how many! It rained some of the way, but my cape kept most of it off. Arthur had a puncture near a village called Keyem, and I think all the children of Belgium watched him mend it. They thought it a great lark when we knocked on a door and asked for a bowl of water to find the hole.
‘We got a room at the Hotel de Dixmude (unpretending, but good enough for us), had a wash, then went into the church, and inspected the fine rood-loft my tutor told us about, as well as an Adoration of the Magi by Jordaens. Tomorrow, we go on to Ypres, then east to Menin, Courtrai and Audenarde and, Oh dear, I don’t know how many places yet, but I don’t doubt, and neither do you, dear mother and father (and Clara and Emma, as well as that horrid little dog), that there will be a letter from each benighted spot.
‘I’m sore from the saddle, though am told such an affliction will pass with time and wear, but in all other ways it is wonderful being awheel in flat-as-a-pancake Flanders. I understand that the Ardennes area is hilly! I shall have to stop being silly! All we hope is that the weather stays dry.
‘Arthur sits on his bed playing the flute, and if he doesn’t pipe-down soon I shall throw my pillow at him, and they have very big ones in Belgium. So that you don’t know of our fight, dear parents, I will close this fond epistle from the almost benighted bicycle-pilgrims!’
Every letter saved, every hotel bill, steamer and railway ticket from John’s holidays, as well as engineering notebooks, drawings and profiles, plans and layouts, and estimates for schemes and bridges. All packed away and hoarded, and for what? Paper well-written on, in a small neat hand as if even a margin would be so much square-inchage of waste. A clever, fun-loving, patriotic uncle dead fifty years before his time, and never known.
Another box was set aside for the war that had to come. John was a soldier at university, and later with the Territorial Force. Photographs showed him at summer camp, and it was easy to pick out the young man with dark curly hair and a handsome hawkish face in his middle twenties. A bushy moustache in later photographs made his face somewhat longer and fiercer. Other snapshots showed him laughing when caught trying to pull down a tent tope, or when a friend was preparing to take the jump at leapfrog. Happy days while they were playing, and Clara noted that it was such a pity that reality caught up with them.
During one of his leaves he stood with a sister on either side, premature regret shaping their set mouths, while John was smiling as if, under the circumstances, nothing less would do. In another photograph, next to a horned gramophone, he sat with a small white dog on his knee. There were scores of letters, neatly tied together, as well as badges and buttons in a cloth bag closed by a drawstring. A dozen damp-stained diaries and notebooks were filled with the same fine hand, except that much of the script was in pencil, and had come back from France:
‘I am sitting on a stool in a deep dugout with thirty feet of solid chalk and sandy clay above my head. I feel very safe. I am living with three of my fellow-officers in a place eight feet by twelve. It has been fine all day, and our guns have not ceased pounding. The day for our big attack has been a long time coming, but the whole army is as confident as can be, and will go over the parapet keen as mustard to get into contact with the enemy. Our men know they are his master in all but barbarous acts.
‘It is now Monday, and has been a great day. I was interrupted all night long with messages, and so got little sleep. I was up at five-fifteen, and at Brigade HQ at 5.27. At Zero Hour – 5.30 – for our operation, every gun we had opened fire and continued hard as could be until we gained our final objective. It began to rain as soon as the battle started, but stopped about 8.30. Later in the day it snowed, but cleared again. While our casualties have not been light they have not been nearly as heavy as at the Somme. Our men behaved wonderfully well, and I am quite proud of my sappers and officers. They carried things along marvellously, and obtained good results.
‘Thursday: Shells were passing over our heads when I was out with my orderly. A wind blew towards us from where the shells were landing and exploding. Suddenly we were both half smothered. We hurried forward to get out of the cloud, but soon were complaining of sore throats and chests from the gas. We should have rested, but went on over the battlefield. The padres were first and foremost. I thought one of them was an Artillery Officer, as he was helping to guide a gun over a soft bit of ground. Large parties were out collecting the dead, and when they got a certain number together, service would be read. The padres are responsible for the proper burial, and for the collection of all papers belonging to the dead. Just as it was growing dark I passed the burial party again still at their work, and I wondered how much longer they would stay. The ground we won looks so hopeless. So many wasted lives. Corpses all around. One of the enemy’s support trenches was strewn with dead men from end to end. The fire from our artillery was so effective, and with such a preponderance of it, that a man behind our barrage could not easily escape death or such awful wounds as I have ever seen. I picked up the latest pattern rifle and some rounds from one of these dead Germans, and hope I shall be able to bring it home on my next leave. There are so many stories that I want to tell, but none of my real thoughts about what happens here can be put into words. I sometimes feel they never will be. Artillery is louder than all speech. When it is close and continuous even the shape of people’s lips is distorted, and they stay calm, though the eyes tell another tale. When the barrage is still I have so much work to do, or I am too numb to think …