We would be constructing defensive earthworks in a vast field lying between Kilnsea and the beginning of the Spurn peninsula. The plans were in a piece of paper held in Captain Quinn’s leather-gloved hands, but the paper and the field would prove to be two different matters.
The trouble (Oliver Butler had been dead right) was that for all our training, none of us could dig properly except for Roy-boy and Andy-lad.
I recall the end of our second week in that slimy field…
Fusilier Scholes – perhaps blown down by the roaring wind, or perhaps having simply missed his footing in the ooze – had lately fallen over, and Captain Quinn had watched him do it.
‘After a very few days, Prendergast,’ I overheard him saying to Oamer, ‘I anticipate that things will be running like clockwork.’
As Scholes struggled to his feet, young William Harvey, trying to shake a clod of earth off his shovel, nearly brained young Alfred Tinsley, who shaped to give him a belt in return. They’d been needling each other for the past hour. Tinsley, as usual, had been talking trains, and William had said, ‘The war’s the thing now, not railways. Personally, I’m glad to be clear of them.’
Captain Quinn watched Oamer separate the pair. Then it was my turn to take a spill into the ditch we were accidentally making (for all the water in the field seemed to be running rapidly into our trench). Quinn climbed onto the horse with which he’d been equipped, saying to Oamer, ‘In summer, Corporal, conditions here would have been very nearly ideal.’
After he’d departed, Oamer asked Andy and Roy Butler to give us all a demonstration of digging, which meant in practice that they gave each other a demonstration of digging. The first thing that told you they knew their way around a shovel was that they called it a blade.
‘Tha needs ter clean t’blade,’ Roy said to Andy.
‘Aye?’ said Andy, taking the role of the apprentice, and giggling back at Roy, ‘Wha’ever fower?’
Roy then touched Andy on the shoulder, and half whispered, ‘Ask me ’ow.’
‘’Ow,’ said Andy. ‘Ow do I clean it?’
Roy produced a wooden wedge from his tunic pocket, holding it up like a magician, which set them both laughing fit to bust. Oamer was looking at me and shaking his head, and Oliver Butler, who’d seen him do it, was scowling at both of us. But the twins were better at teaching digging than the army instructors. The main thing was to pat down the sides of the hole as you dug. Roy and Andy made a big thing of this, and turned it into a singing jig, which they performed while slapping with their shovels the sides of the trench. As far as I could make sense of the words, they ran along these lines:
‘Batter ’em, flatten ’em,
Flatter ’em, splatter ’em,
Don’t leave yer ’ole
’Til yer stuff’s packed flatter ’n that ’n’ mum.’
(Because as well as calling shovels ‘blades’, they called earth ‘stuff’.)
The pressing question, it seemed to me, was: Are this pair actually dangerous? From the look on the face of William Harvey, he thought so, and I knew he’d spoken to Oamer about sleeping away from them in the barn.
Apart from digging, we were told off in pairs for sentry-go. A control point was made on the road leading onto Spurn consisting of three oil drums, two planks of wood and a charcoal brazier. Barbed wire was laid in the fields to either side. In this and the digging, we alternated with the other section from the battalion: we were Shift A, they were Shift B. Most of the traffic that came by was to help with the building of the railway along Spurn, construction of which had started from the opposite end – from the tip, Spurn Point.
The password was ‘Skeleton’.
One morning, when I was doubled-up with Scholes, we were approached by a party of schoolkids from the villages of Kilnsea and its neighbour, Easington.
‘Password,’ said Scholes.
They didn’t know it.
‘Look here,’ I said to the kid in the lead, ‘is there a school on Spurn?’ (For we’d been told nothing about it.)
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t be going there.’
I looked at Scholes, and he was standing with his eyes closed, as if he could transport himself elsewhere by so-doing. Scholes shouldn’t have been a policeman, and he certainly wasn’t cut out for a soldier. He was plum scared of going to France, I knew. He spent most of his guard turns staring out to the high ships and playing mournful tunes on the penny whistle that he’d brought with him in lieu of his flute. I let the kids through – if they were German spies, I would take the knock.
In fact, there was a school on Spurn, as we discovered when the master came along five minutes after. When that bloke had gone through, Scholes looked at the perfectly clear blue sky and said, ‘A storm’s due.’ He’d heard this from one of the B Shift men, who’d had it from the farmer they lodged with. Scholes then asked me what I made of Oliver Butler.
‘Mmm… Tricky customer,’ I said.
‘Fascinated by you, he is. Always plugging me for particulars. What were you like in the police office? Were you up to the mark as a plain clothes man?’
‘Snoopy bugger,’ I said.
‘And Dawson,’ said Scholes, ‘what about him?’
I said I considered him a thoroughly white bloke.
Scholes said, ‘It’s a bit weird being at close quarters with him. In York, I pulled him in twice.’
I asked ‘What for?’ but I already knew.
‘Drunk and Incapable.’
‘On the station?’
‘Aye.’
‘Has he ever mentioned it?’
‘It’s never come up, no. It’s as if he’s blotted it out of his memory.’
‘Did he go away?’ I asked, because you might get a week in a gaol for second time Drunk and Incapable.
‘Fined thirty shillings the first time, forty shillings the next. The second time I had to blow the whistle for Fowler.’
‘Resisted, did he?’
‘Just a bit of lip, really. Not much more than that. Flower wanted him charged with assault, but I talked him round. Didn’t seem worth getting the bloke lagged.’
Any other grade of railwayman would have been stood down for drunkenness, but the porters were all boozy, and known to be so. I reminded Scholes of the run-in the Chief and I had had with Dawson in the Bootham Hotel, and he said, ‘Did you know he’s been warned off half the pubs in York?’
‘Well,’ I said, warming my hands at the brazier, ‘it’s a good thing he doesn’t hold a grudge.’
‘But how do we know he doesn’t?’ said Scholes.
That evening, we were in our makeshift cribs in the barn, one oil lamp to every two men. Scholes was playing his whistle in the farmyard outside in the dark. He’d said the smoke from the brazier made his eyes smart, at which Bernie Dawson had muttered to me, ‘You know, I don’t think he’s going to like the Western Front very much.’
We’d been warned by Oamer to expect news of a duty that would take us onto the actual peninsula for the first time. Meanwhile we were killing time, and listening to Scholes.
Young Alfred Tinsley, the next bloke along from me, was sucking a peppermint and reading the Railway Magazine – lost in it, he was. On the cover, I read ‘Don’t forget your friend in the services. Buy him a Railway Magazine!’ I hadn’t had that particular number yet. It would probably be waiting for me at Hull, the wife having sent it on from Thorpe. I was just then trying to write to the wife. In my last letter I told her that I was unable to disclose our location, and she’d written back saying, ‘Would it be Kilnsea, East Yorks? Because that’s what the postmark says.’ I was now writing that it might be and it might not be, but she should keep in mind that incoming letters were soon to be read by officers as well as outgoing.