BURRANGONG, SEPTEMBER 1978
She looked so cold . . .
‘Mrs McLain! Mrs McLain, wake up. Please wake up! You’ve got to keep moving till we can get warm,’ Arjun said urgently.
The old woman opened her eyes. Thank goodness, thought Arjun, still beating out the signal. She propped herself up on her elbow, gazing at the flood before them, or possibly at a war a world away, then lifted her face to the sunlight, the flood glinting gold as dawn turned into day.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, her voice shaking a little. ‘Sometimes back then too it was as if all the ugliness dropped away. You’d catch a glimpse of stars through the smoke, or a poppy that had survived next to a dead tree, a pinpoint of colour in a black land.’
She looked up at Arjun and smiled. ‘There’ll be a thousand water birds breeding after this. It’ll bring more topsoil down too. But, oh, look at the colour of that sunrise . . .’
And Arjun could see it too. The flood had been an enemy in the darkness, but it was beautiful now, stretching like a golden mirror filling half the world, till the sun rose just a little higher and the water turned brown once more. He suddenly realised what the geography teacher meant when she’d called this side of the river ‘a flood plain’.
The land and the river have been doing this for thousands of years, he thought. Tens of thousands maybe: a miracle lake that appears for a while, far from actual rainfall that created it. He glanced up and saw an eagle riding the first thermals, gazing down not as if it was hunting, but as if the eagle too wanted to see the enormity of water before it slowly shrank away.
‘My grandmother said the pelicans came after the last flood,’ whispered Arjun, suddenly awed. ‘Hundreds of them, and black swans. I haven’t ever seen a swan except on TV.’
He hoped the swans would come again. He hoped he and Mrs McLain would be rescued, so they’d live to see the swans.
‘Have some more chocolate. We need the energy.’ Mrs McLain sat up and reached into her jacket pocket again and pulled out a packet of chocolate frogs. She tipped half the packet into his hands. He bit into the first frog, letting the softened chocolate melt against his tongue. It might have been the best thing he’d ever tasted: exactly what his body craved, sweetness and richness. He bit into another one. ‘What happened after you were shot? Did the ambulance women find you?’
‘I woke in an aide post in France — an English aide post. Yes, Johnson’s Fine Meats found me in the shell hole, but my hand and shoulder had already been bandaged to stop the bleeding, and someone had covered me in a German army coat. The Germans had done their best to let me live. I think . . . I think perhaps they were signallers as well.’
‘Why?’
‘If you’d been a signaller back then, you wouldn’t ask,’ she said quietly. ‘The men who helped me would have known what I’d been through. They knew I’d never be a signaller again, too, because I wouldn’t ever move my hand properly again without all my fingers.’
‘Major Galbraith? Was he at the aide post too?’
‘No. I was too weak to ask for a few days, but when I did no one had heard of him. I asked one of the VADs, the nursing assistants, to check the casualty lists for me. I could see what she’d found as she walked back between the rows of bed. Missing, believed dead,’ she added flatly. ‘Our message had got through. They tried to hold on, but the reinforcements didn’t come in time. They retreated through the area where Alan and I were shot. But they hadn’t found Alan — not even his body.’
‘I . . . I’m sorry.’
‘It was a long time ago,’ she said. She reached out and patted his hand. ‘You’ll find out, my lad. Every life has pain so great you can’t bear it sometimes. But if you do bear it, then finally life seeps in to even the darkest places. But I didn’t know that when I was sixteen.’
‘Had you helped win the war? What did they do after that?’
‘Nothing. Or rather, more of what everyone had been doing since 1914. The Germans advanced a second time, and this time they held the land they’d taken. I found out later that British Intelligence knew the German reinforcements had arrived, but they didn’t tell those in command.’
His mouth dropped open. ‘Why not?’
Her mouth quirked. ‘Cowardice? A failure in the chain of command? We’d never had a chance. Two hundred and forty-five thousand men died in those few days, in an area no larger than between here and town, and for nothing.’
‘So you didn’t help to win the war?’
‘No one “won” that war, laddie. Oh, they say we won in the history books, but that’s just because generals and field marshals and politicians like to look good. No one won. Everyone just got too tired to keep on fighting.’
‘So what happened? How did the war end?’
‘Within a few months the German soldiers began to desert — they’d seen Russian soldiers refuse to fight after the revolution, and so they did the same. They just started walking home, to plant the crops or see their families. The Germans still had more troops than we did, and better equipment, but they knew they couldn’t hold out much longer, and nor could we. So both sides agreed to a ceasefire.’
‘Then why does everyone say we won the war?’ demanded Arjun.
‘The Germans thought they’d get to keep what they’d taken, so they let their armies go home. Our lot kept their armies mostly intact all through 1919, even into 1920 for a lot of them, so when everyone finally worked out a peace treaty the Germans lost everything, and had to pay France and England massive reparations. It meant Germany went broke, and people starved, and that led to the rise of Hitler, harnessing all that anger into World War II.’
So the ‘war to end all wars’ had just led to another, he thought. ‘What happened to you?’
She smiled thinly and threw the paper from the chocolate into the rubbish bin. ‘I didn’t die. I was home for Christmas after all — or I was back in England anyway. They shipped me to a cottage hospital this time as well, because I was a girl and not really in the army, they decided, despite my uniform and my oath. I never wore the insignia again. They took it from me when they shipped me off from France.
‘I reached England on the twenty-first of December, the day I saw Alan’s name finally in the list of dead, but I’d guessed he’d gone by then. If he’d been alive they’d have taken him to the same aide post as me. Mealworm’s name was on the same list, but under wounded. I should have felt glad he was alive, and hope that he’d survive his wound, but I didn’t feel much at all, except for pain. It was too painful to think, and too painful to sleep. I dozed and woke and thought, and tried not to remember, not to think of what might have been, for me and Alan, for the whole empire if we had won that advance.’
‘Couldn’t the doctors stop the pain?’
‘Medical supplies were running short by then, and there weren’t any spare for civilians like me. I didn’t even see a doctor, though one must have stitched me up when I was unconscious. It was just nurses, and most of them were VADs or even volunteers who had no formal training at all, like the ambulance women. I found out I’d lost my job in the post office too the day I was listed as wounded, as I was unfit for service.
‘I was nothing. Nobody.
‘Mama and Papa were at my bedside when I opened my eyes on Christmas Day. Mama had even brought a tiny Christmas pudding, and we shared it with the women in the beds near mine. They stayed with me for two weeks, then Papa had to go back to work at the school. Mama stayed to help wash me and feed me — the hospital depended on relatives or friends or volunteers coming in to help. Finally, I was well enough to go home.’
She looked out into the darkness, her voice cold as the sky. ‘On the last day in hospital Mama took my hand and told me Arthur and William were dead. They’d both died on the Somme, not in some big advance, just from the constant shelling. People think of that war as battles, but there was fighting in between as each side tried to keep their ground. I like to think they were together, but probably they weren’t. They may not even have met. I like to think they felt no pain.’
She gave a ghost of a smile, her face far too pale. ‘That’s what the letters from their commanders said to our parents. They died instantly, and in no pain. Most of the time I can make myself believe it. It’s funny. They were so . . . so alive. I never really thought they would die.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He wished he could think of something more to say.
‘Yes. They say that time heals all wounds. It doesn’t. It just makes them easier to bear. More things fill your life, so the pain is a smaller part of it. But it’s always there. I can still hear William’s laughter as he bowled a googly. Arthur grinning the first time I beat him sending a Morse message. Lots of older brothers wouldn’t like their sisters winning, but Arthur didn’t even doubt I’d sent the entire message.
‘They stopped my pay from the day that I was wounded. I even had to pay for my medical care in England, or my father did — I’d never earned enough to cover it. Seventy hours sending and receiving messages a week, seven days a week, and all for the same wage I’d earned back in the village.’
‘That’s not fair!’
‘It’s old news, laddie. People complained. Even the unions stood up for us. Finally the government agreed that servicewomen who went back to work in the post office would get promotions and some more money too, but as I didn’t have a job there any more it didn’t apply to me. No one needs a telegraph girl with only two fingers that can’t move properly and a thumb. I didn’t even have the strength to walk all day carrying a big mail bag to deliver letters.
‘So I went home, and stayed there. I taught French at the school for a while. It was all I could do.’