‘The thing I abhor more than all else in this war, after the actual loss of life, is that the dead are allowed to lie out in the open, uncovered and uncared for in so many cases. We see in and about our trenches hordes of ponderous rats. I am not sure what species, but they are certainly carnivorous. There is nothing the men out here loathe more than seeing their lumbering bodies dragging along, knowing they have fattened off their dead comrades, and may well fatten off them if ever the time comes. Numerous rat holes are seen over every grave, and our greatest delight is the destruction of these rodents who, by and large, are the only victors of these battles. And children think that Ratty in The Wind in the Willows is a lovable character! What a time he would have had out here! But we shall beat the Hun. We shall go on to the end, and certainly defeat him at his own game of soldiering.’
There was a pile of plain buff-coloured Army Books 152, their pages of squared paper, in which were written factual day-to-day diaries telling what time he got up and went to bed, and what the weather was like. Tom had space in his room to set the notebooks on a shelf for further reading.
When everything had been dragged clear from the cluttered boxroom he discovered a shallow cupboard built into the wall. A zinc lock held the latch in place, but he gripped hard and twisted it from the wood. Inside were measuring tapes, photographic enlargement equipment, a tripod, an engineering level, a miner’s compass, a clinometer and some longish thing wrapped in a tarpaulin sheet which he carried to the living-room. The knot had been hammered into a compact ball, but he pressed and squeezed till the individual strands worked free.
‘I don’t know whether I learned in the orphanage that you never cut string,’ Tom said, ‘or in the Navy, but it’s another old habit that dies hard.’
Maybe it’s part of his nature, Pam thought, to waste nothing, and to let no job daunt him. ‘Makes no difference,’ she said, ‘as long as you get it undone.’
She took a basket from the kitchen and went out, leaving him bemused with his clues and time-schemes, stooping among heaps of ephemera from which he tried to make sense.
Going up a narrow street from the sea, rain drove against her mackintosh. For half the way, till wind blew it clear, a stench of mothballs enveloped her, because the coat came from the hall cupboard and had not been worn for months. Water filled the gutters, and a car splashed her almost to the waist. She stepped across the street to the shops. He needed feeding. Such delving and sifting ate at him from the inside, and made his face thin.
She walked on, a zig-zag course towards the station. The wider road exposed her, icy rain flurrying when she turned towards the seafront. She would never find the flat. She would knock at a door, and someone whom she hadn’t seen before would answer. She would wander around town for the rest of her life wearing Clara’s mackintosh and with a bag of shopping on her arm.
‘Come in,’ he said.
‘The weather’s foul.’ She took the mackintosh into the bathroom and hung it to dry.
He had a rifle in his grease-smeared hands. ‘I was going to come with an umbrella and meet you, but couldn’t be sure of the direction.’
‘I was all right. I didn’t get wet. Where did that come from?’
His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and she noticed a tattoo on his muscular forearm, a fearsome dragon twisted around the words ‘Death or Glory’. Such things decorating men’s bodies made them look like woad-painted people from the Stone Age.
‘Youthful indiscretion,’ he laughed. ‘Done in a drunken moment, if I remember. And I only just do!’
‘I meant the gun.’
He held it high. ‘John must have brought it back – a genuine German rifle from the Arras battlefield. There are a dozen rounds as well. I’ll stow it where it came from. No good to us.’
‘Didn’t do him much good, either.’ She set her basket on the floor. A circular bronze plaque several inches in diameter lay on the piano top. Britannia with trident, and wreath held forth, were accompanied by a lion, surrounded by HE DIED FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR, and the name JOHN CHARLES PHILLIPS in a rectangle above the lion’s head. She put it down quickly, as if it were still alive with grief and loss. The first of two telegrams said: ‘I regret to inform War Office reports Capt. J. C. Phillips died of wounds April 26th.’ The second contained words of solace: ‘The King and Queen deeply regret the loss you and the army have sustained by the death of your son in the service of his country. Their majesties truly sympathize with you in your sorrow.’
‘That’s how it was done.’ He put the rifle away. ‘Their son, and my uncle, may well have taught me a thing or two.’
‘Perhaps if he had lived,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t have been packed off to the orphanage.’
2
Clara said: ‘It was too much to bear. No man was ever more destroyed by the death of his son.’ It must have been the same for all fathers, and worse perhaps for all mothers. The ranks of a family would be torn into by such a death as if a cannon ball had gone through, and they would not close for years.
Percy went to the recruiting office to enlist. He was nearly sixty. Too old. He offered money if they would take him. He wanted to go to France and die, or to get his revenge for John’s death. ‘He went day after day, and mother couldn’t stop him. She was too grieved to try. Father was utterly broken down. One of the sergeants brought him home, and mother thanked him with half a crown for beer. The same sergeant accompanied him a few days later, but refused another half crown.
‘Mother showed me a letter,’ Clara said, ‘that she would send to the War Graves Commission. John’s grave should not be marked with a cross, because he was Jewish. He must be buried under the Hebrew sign, no matter what religion he gave when he enlisted. Though he had not lived as a Jew he was nonetheless one by the Law, as were all children, she insisted, born of a Jewish mother. Father was apathetic, but when he saw the letter he commented that though John had been brought up as a Christian, Rachel was quite right. And what did it matter, since both Jews and Christians believed in the same God? As far as he was concerned they were one people.’
The reply said that in spite of the case being an unusual one it was quite possible and perhaps even proper for his grave to be marked as that of a Member of the Jewish Faith, but that since his records showed him not to be one, it would be necessary to have the authority of a rabbi before her wishes as Captain Phillips’ mother could be carried out. Rachel went from one synagogue to another until she obtained what she wanted from a rabbi who had known her father. Emma went with her, and the rabbi who gave his consent said that she was Jewish too, and ought not to forget it when the time came for her to choose a husband and have children.
‘We went to see John’s grave after the war. Going through the customs at Boulogne was a tedious business. The French officials were very thorough, and there was a long queue, but we patiently put up with it. Father had by this time sufficiently recovered to motor us to Arras, though the roads were still bad and many villages in ruins. Lodgings were scarce, and Emma and I shared a bed at the Hotel de L’Univers.
‘The French people were everywhere sympathetic, though Emma said she smelt nothing but death, and wished she had not come. Father enjoyed the travelling, seeming to forget his troubles and constrictions as we drove along the cobbled roads admiring the scenery. But Emma and I wept at seeing him and mother clinging to each other at the cemetery. At the same time father seemed younger than for many years because, as he said, he felt closer to John than when in England. We took a camera, and there is a photograph of the rabbi-padre standing between father and mother, with Emma and me behind. We were at the grave marked by John’s name and the Star of David. The Englishman in charge of the cemetery was much taken with Emma, and pressed her hand a little too hard and long, she said, when we left.’