Thorpe-on-Ouse and York
I arrived back at our house in Thorpe late in the evening. Only a few chinks of light showed in the village, and both the pubs were closed even though it was not yet ten o’clock. On walking through our front door, my first duty, after kissing the wife, was to be taken into the children’s bedrooms. They had been expecting me, and would on no account go to sleep until I arrived. Harry climbed out of his bed, and met me in the hallway, holding a candle.
‘Dad,’ he said, ‘what do you think of The Count of Monte Cristo?’, asking the question as though it was a matter of the greatest urgency and importance, and the trouble was that he’d actually read it himself, after a fashion, and been very taken with the whole idea of it.
I ruffled his hair, and said, ‘Ask me another’, and he didn’t see the joke at all, but just walked away.
I followed the boy into his room, saying I was saving the book for France, at which he bucked up slightly. His room was fuller of books than I remembered. Harry was shaping up as an intellect. I went through to Sylvia’s room; she was half asleep. She opened one eye, and, looking at me rather narrowly, said, ‘I’ve been talking to Daisy Backhouse about you.’ Daisy Backhouse was the daughter of Lillian and Peter. ‘She says your best bet is to get wounded.’
‘Really?’
‘Quite badly. Then they’ll send you home.’
‘Tell Daisy Backhouse she’s being far too gloomy, and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’
‘I might tell her the first part,’ Sylvia said, and then: ‘Give me a kiss anyway. I’m rather tired.’
‘She seems to have become rather a cool customer since I saw her last,’ I said to the wife, as she turned down the gas on the landing.
‘It’s how she hides her feelings,’ said the wife, who, after having a last look in at Harry, returned to the Count of Monte-bloody Cristo. ‘You have had it for a year, Jim; it was a special edition and he did buy it with his own money.’
Later, in our own bedroom, the wife made herself available to me. Well, she was doing her bit for morale, but it was an awkward business, which might have gone off better had she produced my coming-home present – two bottles of Smith’s purchased at the employee’s preferential rate at the Co-Operative Stores – before rather than after. As we sat side by side on the bed, she let on that, what with half my wages (which the North Eastern Railway was paying at the full rate), the separation allowance, and her own pay from the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, she was better off than ever. So there were no worries on that front. She then asked me about life in the billets.
I said, ‘On Spurn Head, you mean?’
‘So that’s where you were?’
‘You better forget I said that.’
I told her what had happened to Harvey, angling the account to make it look like suicide.
‘The poor boy killed himself,’ she said obligingly, then, ‘I’m not going to think about it any more.’
She started talking about her own work. She herself was still in favour of the war, so she wasn’t a peace activist exactly, but the concern of her committees was that the war should be fought ‘fairly’.
‘What does that mean?’ I said, and she told me it meant that men or their wives should not lose out by enlisting, and that the food price rises should be kept in check. She had also helped to set up – together with the Church of England Men’s Society (or some such outfit of do-gooders) – a ‘Soldiers and Sailors Buffet’ in an old carriage that had been shunted into place at the bay platform number eight at York station.
I said I didn’t like the sound of the Church of England Men.
‘Why ever not?’ said the wife.
‘There ought not to be any of them left. They ought all to be in France.’
‘Their average age is fifty.’
‘Oh.’
‘And some of them are awfully handsome, considering.’
This, I knew, was my cue to have another go at love-making; and a more satisfactory result was obtained this time.
The next day, I went into town with the wife, and she marched me straight up to Walton’s, the outfitters on Parliament Street, where they had mannequins in the window showing officers’ service dress. Officers, the wife informed me, were able to choose their own colours for their shirts and ties, within reason. She’d been in and asked about this. She thought the set in the window would suit me. It was labelled ‘Mustard’.
‘But I’m not an officer,’ I said.
‘But you will be.’
It was a bright day, if cold, and York seemed full of slackers. Of course, it always had been, but you noticed them now there weren’t supposed to be any. They’d all have some tale about why they’d put off joining the colours; special circumstances would have urged them to hold back: ‘I’m worried about me old mum, you see. She can’t be left for a minute.’ The usual loungers stood at the gates of the Museum Gardens, smoking away, and not in the least put out by the sight of men going past in uniform, because there were plenty of those, York being a garrison town. All the pubs were open, I was relieved to see, but they had funny little notices posted on their doors, these being to do with new regulations of the York Licensing Justices. They would be closed by nine – and this was why Thorpe-on-Ouse had been dark the night before. The shops were all trading normally, if anything looking busier than before. There were more flags about, but fewer horses (horses had been commandeered) which meant more motor vehicles. I looked at the city in a different way. The Victorian War memorials meant something more to me now. In truth they made my stomach lurch, and the beauty of the whole place, with its picturesque buildings, chiming churches and festive air seemed something precious, something that might soon be lost, or lost to me at any rate. The cocoa smell was in the air from the chocolate factories, and that too made me feel nervous, but then it always had done for some reason. The scene in every street reminded me of the postcards sold from Field’s, the stationer in Stonegate, which showed York scenes and were all inscribed ‘Old York’, whether they showed the particularly old buildings or not.
On Ouse Bridge, I spied Black Leonard, the darkie who advertised pleasure cruises on the vessel called The River King, which was known as Black Len’s Barge, and was the only pleasure cruiser to run all year round. Black Leonard wore his sandwich board as usual, giving the prices, and at the bottom was a new notice, ‘Wounded Soldiers Go Free’.
The wife looked with approval at that. It was ‘only fair’. As we turned into Coney Street, she told me that the Co-Operative ladies were proposing to dig up the cricket pitches of the city, so as to grow food for the returning and wounded soldiers. I said, ‘I think they’d rather watch the cricket’. But the wife knew nothing of cricket. If a man knew as little about Women’s Co-Operation as the wife knew about cricket she’d be down on him like a ton of coal.
On Coney Street, a bill for the Press read ‘N.E.R. BATTALION MEN OFF ON ACTIVE SERVICE’, which somehow gave the impression that we were all dead keen to be off. I didn’t buy the paper. It would be all about the successful conclusion of operations at Gallipoli, just as though the object of the attack all along had been to retreat. I stood and watched the traffic of blokes going in and out of Sinclair’s, the tobacconist. That was the Chief’s favourite shop, but I did not want to strike the Chief on my ramble about the city; I wasn’t up to hearing him talk of the new machine guns. I would come back and see him when I had a decoration or a commission.