Intervals of Hope, page 14
Jane and I began to take long walks in the cold together, despite the snow and heavy winds that sometimes whipped through the open fields, ending with time spent sitting beneath a frosty weeping willow beside Miller’s pond where we would kiss and talk.
One particularly cold afternoon beneath the willow, Jane sat in the snow as I stood over her. The icicles were clanging in the breeze as our hands clasped together.
“Tell me about England,” she said.
“No thanks,” I replied.
“Anything,” she said, smiling.
“This place is a barren version of Northaw, where I wanted us all to live. Imagine this place here with more trees, oaks and poplars and some nice willows in the mix, and jasmine in the air. More robins and sparrows. Pastures of sheep. Wild pheasants ripe for the hunt, if we could bag any. That’s how it was. Then put loads of raggedy kids trampling over fields and invading houses, and add the threat of the German military doing the same. That’s Northaw now. I can’t think of England anymore.”
She looked around at our frozen surroundings.
“Here, it’s peaceful,” she said. “Even serene. But much too frigid today.”
“This place has avoided effects of the war. No invasions are coming here. That’s why we came.”
“To escape?”
“My uncle’s foolish. He’s too easily led by fear. I used to think the same way, but soon got over it. At least, I think I’m over it now.”
“Would you want to return?”
“I would. Except, leaving you might knock me to pieces.”
We took an excursion into a field of tall grass nearby, at liberty to explore each other’s bodies beneath our jackets with cold, freely roaming hands; ashamed at dishonouring God, we repented during church service the following Sunday.
Weeks later as Jane and I walked to Miller’s pond together, the snow drifting down over the empty fields, the day overcast, Jane stopped me suddenly by the bank of the pond. The tall grass was nearly buried in white, the pond frozen stiff.
“I don’t mean to startle you,” she said, “But I’m with child.”
“Impossible,” I replied instantly.
She stared at me, silent for a moment before speaking again.
“Really?” she asked. “You know how that happens, right?”
“Well… how do you know?”
“A woman knows.”
“…and that’s all I need?”
“That’s all you need.”
I was attending church regularly for the first time I could remember, and I began asking God to give me the strength and the means, as an expectant father, to somehow go overseas and fight in the war that was consuming the radio airwaves and my idle thoughts. An honourable man would wait until after we were married, and the child was born.
I began reading Pa’s wartime diary again.
Salisbury Plains, Bustard Camp, England
December 6, 1914
The weather is getting quite cold. The ground is frozen solid this morning. We got rain instead of snow and the wind is blowing pretty hard. A lot of the tents have blown over. The people of England say they never saw so much rain. On Sundays, church was held in the big YMCA tent. I have been to church more times since I joined the Army, learning of the free gift of salvation through Christ in unruly congregations, than the whole time I was in St Thomas.
We have been having sham battles lately under an English General. Last week, all the Canadian Forces got together for big doings. Artillery, cavalry, and infantry all assembled for a big battle.
King George, Lord Kitchener, and some other big bugs reviewed us first and said they were greatly pleased with the Canadians. I was second in line from the front when the King arrived, and I had a good look, considering him a pretty impressive fellow. Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, said he wants to finish up this conflict and intends to send a million men to the front.
The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Battalions got out for sham battles. We had blank ammunition and went through the exercise as if we were at the front. The 1st and 2nd Battalions were pitted against the 3rd and the 4th. After getting two or three miles apart, we then made for one another. There are so many forests around. One was the attacking party, and they had to find where the enemy was and make an attack. Often, the attacking party found it difficult to know what they were shooting their blank ammunition at, lost in the hills and woods and unable to find the enemy.
English instructors trained us to dig trenches, locate the enemy in difficult terrain, and sharpen our bayonets, so we are ready for the Germans.
We are expecting to leave before long, and I am certainly wishing to do so.
Once Devon learned of my impending marriage to Jane, then of our baby, he would be furtively pleased at his triumph of having held me back from any further talk of going away to war.
Our existence in England seemed a lifetime ago, although only a few months had passed.
But I would marry and sign up immediately after for service in the army, to be sent overseas. Whether I would await the birth of our child would depend upon when the notice would come to report for duty. The decision would be in God’s hands.
I would serve with my wife and child in mind, the picture of our baby either a photograph or one contrived by my imagination, fighting just as Pa had when he was thinking of Mum and their future together.
17
Peering out through the wavering hand-blown window glass of the bedroom I shared with Ian and Mum, I saw Uncle Devon shuffling through the fog. Within an hour, the haze now descending on the countryside would lift and there would be an unfettered view clear to the nearby snow-covered hills. The hills were already apparent as vague outlines of shadows set on the horizon.
Those hills were the reason this site had been chosen by so many Irish men and women, Great Granny said, because it reminded them of their home. There was even a town called Stratford here, a place with Shakespearean productions, swans, a river, and a church like the Stratford-Upon-Avon in England.
Over the past weeks since our arrival in Khartum, Devon had become sore at any mention of the war in Europe. Although Canada declared war on Germany just after England had, I saw no signs of it. It was nothing like what was happening in London. There were no sandbags, no trenches except for irrigation trenches, no blackouts except when the oil lamp ran dry, no evacuations, no drills, no shelters or hiding underground, no gas masks, no barrage balloons, and no clutter of enemy aeroplanes overhead. Just the sky free and clear by night and day.
“Nicholas,” Mum said, stirring a pot on the stove.
She smiled as I descended the steps, the smell of oatmeal filling the place. “Twenty years old today. A young man.”
“I don’t feel much like a man today,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Sassy all your days,” she said.
Outside the window, Doctor Mitchell was talking with one of the families nearby. The Mayor drove by in the town’s only car. I sat down, and Mum moved over to stand behind me, stroking my hair as she had when I was a boy.
“Doctor Mitchell once had a hundred patients,” she said. “But now the lumber mill is boarded shut, the railway bypassed this place, the land’s almost unfarmable, and—what more?”
“The post office is all closed up,” I said. “No more mail for us.”
“Right. That’ll be the death of this town. But Doctor Mitchell will be moving soon, along with everyone else. Still, no matter what I tell your Uncle Devon, he insists we stay. He’s not leaving his grandmother, and she says she’ll die if she leaves this place. So, for now, we’ll not be going off anywhere.”
“I should be overseas fighting. I’ll certainly be glad to get out of this deserted place.”
“You don’t need to be part of that,” she said as she began massaging my shoulders.
“You’re repeating what Devon said.”
“He’s your uncle. Now, since I seem to be repeating your Uncle Devon’s words, family is all you have in life. That’s all he says when I talk of moving back to England after the war.”
“And when I talk of going to fight.”
“Still, there is some truth to that…but for now, we made our own family here.”
“All his prattle is to make me stay.”
“You know he needs your help. We all do. We need our crops here to survive. Not like Devon’s hobby farm in Northaw. But don’t tell him I called it that.”
“I’ll tell him nothing, and I won’t describe to you the chicken scraps and half-rotten potatoes we ate nearly every night for a year there, with the occasional ham, lettuce and carrots. Here, it’s potatoes almost every night, so I suppose that was better.”
She removed her hands from my shoulder and turned up the radio to produce the spry sounds of an orchestra.
“Uncle Devon is avoiding military service for me, and himself,” I said. “He served in the last war and from what Pa said, his service wasn’t very long. I wonder why?”
“He hasn’t told me. I would suggest you not ask him, either. He’ll become cross with you.”
“We’re already at odds. Ever since we moved here.”
“He only wants things a certain way, that’s all,” she said, placing a bowl of oatmeal on the table and moving to clean the dishes in the sink.
When I arrived home from the frozen Miller’s pond late one afternoon, Ian was sitting at the table for dinner. Devon walked into the house with freshly chopped wood, placed the pile in my arms, and instructed me to stack the wood by the fireplace.
Devon whispered something to Mum, and she laughed, slapping his hand playfully. Her laughter, so infrequently heard, had a peculiar, resonant, and disconcerting timbre.
We sat down to a dinner of potato and leek soup and potato bread, the fire under the cooking pot crackling. For some reason, there was an unlabelled bottle of wine at the table, and Mum and Devon were drinking the murky red fluid.
Everyone waited for Mum to give thanks for the meal. She was silent for a moment, apparently listening to grainy news on the wireless radio; word echoed through the house that the British Army was recruiting Commandos, a group being formed at the order of Winston Churchill to execute raids on German-occupied territories.
“I’ll turn that off, Doreen,” Devon said, slithering behind Mum and brushing up close as he made his way to the radio.
Mum said a prayer, thanking the Lord that, for now, we were all together.
I experienced the same bilious feeling in my gut as when I left so many years ago for the mines of South Leeds. My imminent departure now for the service overseas would be a proper one, though, and not one which I would leave for unannounced at night without saying goodbye.
Devon tore apart a piece of stale bread with his teeth, making him resemble the biggest of the swineherd tearing at a boiled corncob. I had no qualms about such imaginings, no remorse. But still, I was nauseous at mealtimes now, a vehement repugnance accentuated at the thought that, if he had not taken us away from England to isolate us here, joining the military would have been easier and I would be without excuse.
Dinner passed without conversation, the inaudible rhythm of Irving Berlin followed by the crackly spontaneity of Benny Goodman on the wireless, and my uncle loudly nuzzling soup into his mouth in accompaniment.
After he was finished, Devon rose from the table and added a log to the fire. His wound from a sharp edge of the pig’s slop bucket had opened, and he put his hand high in the air to rewrap it tightly in a bloody bandage before sitting back down again.
“You ought to have Doctor Mitchell examine that,” Mum said. “While he is still here.”
“Where is he off to?” Devon asked.
“Some other place, same as everyone else.”
Ian sat on the floor playing jacks as Mum turned the dial on the radio to a different station, reduced the volume, and sat down at the table to stare at the floor as she listened.
At times such as these, when everyone seemed to disregard my presence and there was talk of those who would soon leave the town, I had the notion that I was not here; as though I was the subject of their conversation. I saw myself living for a short time with Jane, until my official notification came to go overseas. Events were beginning to unfold as they would without me. No longer here to argue with my uncle, to assist with the pigs and the fields and stacking logs, Ian would have to help, at least for the next while until I was able to return. Not present to have long discussions with Mum about our lives here and the plans for the family’s future with or without Devon and Great Granny (who went to bed early and was often snoring softly in the next room as we talked), or about the people of the town and the circumstances that had led them here and what kept them tied to this place, I could no longer provide the controversy that stimulated their lives and seemed to deepen them and make them whole. Now, at times such as this, we seemed apart, separate, disjointed, and already living disparate lives.
A news bulletin came over the radio. Mum rose from the table and moved to the counter to listen closely.
“Devon, what happened to you in the last war?” I asked.
He glanced over from the fireplace, silent, unresponsive. All eyes were on me.
“I heard you didn’t serve for long,” I continued. “Something about unauthorized leave in London, and then you not returning to Bustard Camp and being labelled as a deserter?”
“None of your concern,” he replied.
“Were you court martialled?” I continued. “Pa said you were worried about being put in front of a firing squad.”
Devon was silent.
“Your uncle’s right,” Mum said. “His business, not ours.”
“You wanted no part of that war,” I continued, “or this one. That’s why you moved us here, to nowhere. So no one, not even the government, can find us.”
Devon walked to the door, suddenly sore. “You’re hopeless.”
As he walked outside, Ian said nothing in response, but we simply stared at Devon through the window. He threw a pile of logs, which impacted heavily against the side of the work shed.
“That’s not our business,” Mum said to me, frowning.
“Aren’t you curious what we’re doing here in this deserted town, in the middle of this empty country?” I asked, addressing her.
“Go to your room. Our room.”
“I’m twenty, now. A man. You can’t tell me—”
She slapped me across the face, interrupting me.
“What’s what anymore,” I continued, rubbing my cheek.
“I certainly can,” she said. “I can take sassy, but smarmy I won’t. Not if you want to live here.”
She stared at me as Devon walked inside, over to the fireplace, clutching the cloth around his hand. Poking at the fire with a metal rod, the fire crackled, blazed for a moment, and then died down. There was too much moist wood smothering the fire, and the charred cinders had begun to smoke excessively.
Mum rose and began gathering up the dishes as Devon rearranged the logs. I waited for him to pick up a log and toss the smoking mass at my head, an act of which I thought him capable, before walking into the next room where I began reading my book about deserters executed in the field during the Great War.
James Wilson, in the 4th Canadian Infantry, was described as “undesirable” for military service. He was charged eight times with committing crimes while in service, repeatedly going Absent Without Leave after landing in France, and he endured three Field General Court Martial hearings. I peered through this man’s record for punishments he received for desertion, to see what penalties Devon might have received. Of this man’s record of drunkenness, rowdy behaviour, kicking a Non-Commissioned Officer, and general bad character, there were 28 days in detention, loss of a month’s pay, apprehension by military police, seventy days Field Punishment Number 1 (which from a drawing, involved having his hands tied behind his back to a fence), hearings, 90 days detention, then fleeing the scene of the Battle of Mount Sorrel where 2600 Canadian lives were lost, resulting in his own death sentence.
My eyes rose from the book. Mum was staring at me.
“Well, what do you have to say?” she asked. “Your uncle’s furious with you. Keeps on about how long he has housed, clothed, and fed you both here and in Northaw, not to mention the summers we spent there together.”
Induced guilt. Time for a distraction, one that would turn her mood around.
“Jane and I will marry,” I replied.
“Really?”
Her expression changed to a smile. She reached over and hugged me.
“So, when did this happen?” she asked.
“Well, I’ve yet to ask her,” I said. “But I’m certain what she’ll say. I just need a ring.”
“You can have Great Granny’s,” she said, clasping my hand. “It has a small diamond. The wedding will be a small affair. Perhaps springtime. We’ll invite everyone in town.”
“We couldn’t have done that in London.”
“Definitely not,” she said, still smiling as she departed for the kitchen.
I overheard her telling Devon this news, along with his response.
“Finally, he will do something good and decent,” Devon said.
Static-filled news of some overseas battles filtered into the room. I put a pillow over my ears to drown out the details as I peered through the window at the Mayor driving with his family in the town’s only car. Watching the snow descend gently to earth, I eventually fell asleep in the early evening.
18
Our wedding was not spectacular, except for my beautiful bride with her hair pinned up, wearing a lovely, pervasive smile. I overheard some guests commenting on the whole affair as dismal. There were the typical accoutrements as there would be at any wedding: flowers, corsets, buttons, bows, frilly lace, women and men scrubbed with scented soaps. But the flowers were dried and colourless, not fresh, the corsets were not straight, and the buttons, bows, and lace were all tattered and frayed with age. The old wooden church had holes in the ceiling, and light filtered in from above, illuminating an array of weatherworn pews and 30 guests from the few families that comprised the population of Khartum.
