‘You know what they say – there’s nothing we can do for the dead, so let’s concentrate on the living.’ Muriel’s wise advice when she heard the sad news about Donald Wheeler was put into action before his funeral took place on the following Tuesday.
Monday morning was cold and damp and she and Violet walked briskly into town from Chapel Street, leaving Ida to man the fort. ‘I mean you, Violet. If this business about Douglas Tankard is still bothering you, we can drop in at the library to find out more.’
‘I won’t rest until I know what happened to him,’ Violet confessed. Though Eddie had tried to keep her chin up over the weekend by inviting her to Valley Road for Sunday dinner, her head had been filled with endless, worrying questions about her father.
‘And Eddie’s guess is that he went missing in action – is that it?’ Emerging from Brewery Road onto Canal Road, Muriel gathered what she could from Violet before their proposed trawl through records in the reference department of the central library.
‘I’m thinking about the look on Uncle Donald’s face when he was telling me about it.’ In fact, Violet couldn’t get rid of the memory of his dark eyes glittering as he gripped her hand and drew her towards him. No last letter, no death certificate. Nothing. ‘I’m certain he wanted to tell me more but the nurse stepped in and he didn’t have time.’
‘Half an hour in the library should clear it up.’
‘What will we be looking for in the library?’ Violet asked Muriel as they walked under the railway bridge and turned a corner onto St David’s Street where the clean, curved façade of the new Odeon dominated the older Victorian buildings. A stiff breeze swept down the steep hill, raising autumn leaves and litter from the gutters and blowing cold drizzle in their faces.
‘We’ll go upstairs into the reference section.’ Muriel knew her way around the library and she had a clear strategy. ‘All the men from round here who enlisted for the Great War joined the Yorkshire Warriors – that was their nickname. It was really the Yorkshire Regiment. The Second Battalion went to the Western Front in October 1914 then the Fourth and Fifth Battalions followed in spring the next year. But before we make our way upstairs to read the records we’ll be checking the names on the Roll of Honour inside the main entrance.’
As she and Muriel reached the entrance to the library, they came face to face with a group of chattering schoolchildren with satchels and books, surging down the wide steps onto the pavement.
‘Let’s wait until the coast is clear,’ Muriel suggested, standing to one side. Her slim-fitting grey coat and maroon cloche hat, handbag and gloves gave her a sophisticated air that wouldn’t have made her seem out of place on the fashionable streets of much larger cities. ‘The Roll of Honour gives the names of infantrymen with the Yorkshire Warriors who fell in battle. They should be in alphabetical order,’ she told Violet.
Violet felt small and inexperienced beside Muriel. If she’d been prepared for coming into town she would have dressed more smartly. As it was, she was in her second-best, navy blue coat, threadbare around the collar and cuffs, which had been made for her by Aunty Winnie when Violet was fifteen.
The children flowed past, full of laughter and excited chatter.
‘Ready?’ Without waiting for Violet’s answer, Muriel went up the steps, between fat, fluted stone columns, through hefty doors with brass handles into the library.
The peculiar smell of old books – a mixture of leather bindings, musty paper, glue and ink – hit Violet immediately, together with lavender furniture polish and linoleum. There in front of them was a turnstile entrance into the lending section – a high-ceilinged room lined with thousands of brown, black and red volumes, many too high to reach without the use of a special stepladder. And to their right was the Roll of Honour for the Yorkshire Regiment, printed in gold on a varnished oak panel – name after name of privates, corporals, sergeants and captains who marched into battle and never returned. Sons, husbands, fathers.
‘Watson, West, Weatherly … Wheeler.’ It took Muriel no time at all to find Joe’s name on the list. ‘Savage, Selkirk, Swinson, Taylor …’
Violet could see for herself that Douglas Tankard did not appear.
‘What did happen to him, I wonder?’ Muriel’s curiosity took her up some wide stairs ahead of Violet until they came to another turnstile manned by a smart young woman with neatly waved hair and a dark brown blouse with cream collar and cuffs. Muriel showed her membership card and signed Violet in as a visitor. They went through the waist-high turnstile into another vast room filled with a maze of bookcases separated by narrow walkways. Straight ahead was a counter with a large sign above it. The sign read, Reference Stacks. No Books to be Taken Away.
A second attendant, less well turned out than the first, stood behind the desk, pencil poised. ‘Good morning. What is the name of the book or document that you wish me to fetch?’
‘We want to look at the military records of men who joined the Yorkshire Warriors in the spring of 1915, please.’ Muriel kept her voice low so as not to disturb other readers in the vicinity. ‘I take it you keep a copy for the general public to consult?’
‘We certainly do. Wait here please.’
The woman glided off and soon returned bearing a slim foolscap volume bound in green cloth and decorated with a gold regimental insignia. She put it down on a table to the side of the counter then invited Muriel and Violet to sit down and peruse it at leisure.
‘Alphabetical again,’ Muriel murmured, opening the volume at the letter R and turning pages until she came to names beginning with S. She traced her finger down the page and they read in silence.
Pte Tankard, Douglas, 4th Battalion, 12 March 1915 – 3 May 1915, AWOL.
Muriel’s finger hovered. She looked in alarm at Violet then closed the book with a faint thud.
‘AWOL?’ Disconcerted, Violet shook her head.
The woman behind the desk cast a quick, curious glance in their direction.
‘Hush!’ Muriel slid her arm through Violet’s and walked her away, back through the turnstile, down the stairs and past the painting of the mayoral dignitary.
Outside on the steps Violet asked again: ‘What does it mean?’
‘AWOL is “absent without leave”. It means Douglas Tankard abandoned his post without permission.’
‘Not injured?’
‘No, and not necessarily dead either,’ Muriel confirmed, wondering whether Violet could stand another shock after all she’d been through. ‘As far as the army is concerned, Tankard was the lowest of the low. He was a deserter.’
From their vantage point at the top of the hill, Violet stared down towards the railway bridge at the bottom, her shoulders slumped. People hurried heads down about their Monday-morning business – in and out of shops, on and off buses and trams, crossing the street. ‘They executed men like that, didn’t they?’ She knew this much from her history lessons.
‘Yes. They put them in front of a firing squad and shot them at dawn as an example to others.’
Violet shivered.
‘But that’s not what the record is telling us,’ Muriel said, slowly piecing together her own knowledge about such things. ‘It doesn’t show a date for a court martial, for instance, let alone an execution.’
‘Then what does it tell us?’ Confirmation of the suspicions that Violet had harboured since her last talk with Uncle Donald put her mind in a spin.
‘That Tankard ran away and they never managed to recapture him,’ Muriel explained. ‘He left his comrades on the field of battle. I’m afraid that’s a big black mark against him in anybody’s book.’
That evening Violet arranged with Eddie for him to bring Stan up to Overcliffe Common to meet her there.
‘What’s wrong with the Green Cross?’ a mystified Stan had asked when Eddie had met him outside Kingsley’s. ‘I’ve put in a full day today. A man works up a thirst after ten hours of fine-tuning looms.’
‘Violet wants a word in private,’ Eddie had explained. ‘We can call in at the Cross later, if you like.’
So at half past six in what was left of the daylight, the threesome embarked on a walk across the rough grass towards the far boundary of the Common, with a view of Little Brimstone and the moor beyond.
‘Sorry to drag you out here, Stan, but this won’t take long,’ she assured him. ‘It’s just … I’ve taken the trouble to find out more about our father.’
‘Who art in heaven,’ Stan quipped uneasily. He used his tried-and-tested weapon of flippancy to hide the storm of conflicting emotions that Violet’s recent revelation had awakened.
Eddie frowned and gave him a warning look.
‘It’s bad news but Eddie and I talked it through and we thought you ought to know,’ Violet continued. ‘He is your father as well as mine, when all’s said and done.’
‘Is or was?’ Stan quibbled over the detail. He slowed his pace and gave a quick shake of his head, as if a fly was bothering him.
‘Is,’ Eddie confirmed. ‘It turns out he wasn’t killed by the Germans, Stan.’
‘Come off it,’ Stan muttered resentfully as he thrust his hands in his trouser pockets.
‘We’re serious. I went with Muriel to the library. She helped me look up the army records. They showed that Douglas Tankard went absent without leave.’
‘When?’ Stan demanded more details.
‘In May 1915, just a couple of months after he joined up.’
Stan’s frown deepened. ‘Running away was what the bastard was best at,’ he said savagely.
‘We knew you wouldn’t like it and I don’t blame you,’ Eddie said. ‘But when you stop to think about it, absent without leave could mean a few things. Sometimes they were men who got captured by the enemy but then they would show up later as prisoners of war and that would be entered on the record. Others were wounded and were carted off to field hospitals, but likewise that would be written up afterwards.’
‘That’s how we can be sure that he ran off on purpose,’ Violet added.
‘So for all we know he skedaddled and could still be alive.’ Stan gritted his teeth and kicked aimlessly at a rough piece of turf. He thought back to the years of hand-to-mouth struggle when he was a small, skinny schoolboy – the one at the back of the class with holes in his shoes, no coat and an empty belly, who ran errands after school for the halfpenny that would buy him two bread buns to take home – one each for him and his mother.
‘He could,’ Violet acknowledged. More than anything, she felt sorry now for upsetting Stan. ‘Maybe I should’ve kept it to myself.’
Stan stared at the ground. ‘Bastard,’ he said again. Then, still shaking his head, he took his hands from his pockets and turned his back on the emptiness of the moor. ‘Come on, you two – how about that drink? It’s on me.’
The Green Cross was busy as usual. Chalky White stood behind the bar with sleeves rolled up, pulling pints as fast as he could. While Stan elbowed his way through the noisy crowd, Eddie and Violet found a corner table to sit at.
‘I should have kept quiet,’ Violet muttered. She’d spent the time during the walk down to Ghyll Road regretting her decision to involve her half-brother.
‘You know Stan – he won’t stay down in the dumps for long. And he deserved to know,’ Eddie reassured her. ‘Look at him now, chatting ten to the dozen with Alf Shipley and Kenneth Leach.’
Sure enough, Stan was deep in conversation and when he brought the drinks across to Violet and Eddie, he dragged the Barlows’ driver and the local handyman with him.
‘What now?’ From the lively expression on his pal’s face, Eddie sensed a fresh turn of events.
Stan settled the glasses on the table then nudged Alf. ‘Tell ’em.’
Even out of uniform, Alf Shipley retained his military air. Head tilted to emphasize the square set of his jaw and with shoulders back, he could have stepped straight off the parade ground. ‘You’re looking at a man fresh out of work,’ he announced without any lead in, while Kenneth stood by shaking his head. ‘That’s right – Barlow gave me my marching orders.’
‘Or, to be more accurate, it was Mrs Barlow who blew her top,’ Kenneth added. ‘I was there to change a washer on the kitchen tap so I saw what happened.’
‘Blow me down.’ Eddie made room for the two men to sit at the table. ‘When was that?’
‘Earlier today.’ Alf seemed philosophical. ‘She near as damn it tore the uniform off my back and sent me packing.’
‘All over nothing.’ Kenneth made a good witness to events. ‘She’d had a barney with her friend Ella Kingsley. I was in the kitchen. They were next door in the breakfast room and I heard Mrs Barlow weeping and wailing like she does then screaming her head off. I don’t know the ins and outs but it ended with Mrs Kingsley driving off and Mrs B storming into the kitchen, yelling for Alf to bring the car to the door.’
Alf took up the story. ‘It was in the garage and by the time I’d brought the Daimler round to the front of the house she was beside herself, calling me all the names under the sun for slacking. I was sacked on the spot. Kenneth was caught in the cross fire and she sent him packing too.’
‘So here we are.’ A gloomy Kenneth drowned his sorrows in his pint glass.
Eddie and Stan commiserated while Violet pictured the scene at Bilton Grange and wondered what had caused the argument between Ella Kingsley and Alice Barlow, tuning in again when Alf offered his opinion.
‘If you ask me, it’s what happens when problems between a man and his wife run out of control. Everyone else takes the flak.’
At the mention of Colin Barlow, Violet was suddenly alert, but she held back from drawing attention to herself. Luckily, Eddie stepped in and asked questions for her.
‘Why, what’s Colin Barlow up to now?’
‘Word is that he’s taken up with another of the young lasses that works for him.’ The hitherto inscrutable Alf made no bones about his ex-boss’s philandering. ‘Someone must have let the cat out of the bag. My guess is that the reason for Mrs Kingsley’s visit earlier today was to put Mrs Barlow in the picture.’
Violet felt her stomach lurch but neither she nor Eddie passed comment. It was Stan who said what they all felt. ‘You’d feel more sorry for Alice Barlow if she wasn’t such a nasty piece of work.’
‘It’s hard to have any sympathy,’ Alf agreed. ‘I’ve been on the sharp end of her tongue once too often. Do it this way. No, do it that way. Job or no job, I’m glad to be free of the woman, believe you me.’