BUTTERWOOD, 1918
School was exactly the same, and totally different. The same smell of chalk and sweaty socks; the same thud of cricket balls on bats; even the boys’ yells hadn’t changed.
The classrooms were a little shabbier. The faces were thinner from rationing and shortages. There was a rumour that the Tuesday and Thursday lunchtime Irish stew was bulked out with grass, instead of cabbage, which Papa said was certainly not true, because there was no one to mow the lawns or even keep the oval neat, except the boys themselves, so where would so much grass come from?
Jotters the groundman, was dead at Poitiers. A new roll of honour in the hall grew longer every week, the names inscribed with gold — teachers, students who had enlisted straight from school, and from there to death.
The teachers at the school were all elderly, retired men come back, and cranky with it, except for Mr Havisham, a young ex-lieutenant who taught the seniors maths, who walked with a stick because he had a carved new foot, and who jumped when the boys who hated maths blew up paper bags and popped them behind him in the corridor.
Jean burst into tears the one time she saw Mr Havisham jump, then limp into the nearest empty room to hide his embarrassment. She rounded on the boys, yelling at them with oaths she’d learned in the past two years but never used. The boys stopped popping paper bags behind Mr Havisham after that.
Every day she thought, I never told Alan that I loved him. Had he heard that last message tapped in Morse? Or had he died before she’d even found the shell casing?
She taught the juniors. The boys launched spit balls at her as soon as her father had left after introducing her. Young men, really, only a year younger than her, and twice as tall.
‘Bonjour,’ she said quietly to the class of enormous boys.
The boys laughed. Sanderson Minor in the front row yelled out, ‘Show us your knickers!’
She held up her injured hand. ‘Je vais te montrer ça. Mes doigts sont toujour dans la boue et le sang de la France. My fingers are still in the mud and blood of France. I gave them for my country. It is a small price to pay to help save the land you love.’
Silence. She said, in English, ‘I still find it hard to write with my left hand, so we will focus on French conversation in class. I will give you written exercises to do in prep, and then we will mark them together.’
No one laughed. A hand rose. She tried to remember his name. Montrose, that was it.
‘How did you lose your fingers, miss?’ His voice was tentative, respectful.
‘I don’t remember much,’ she lied. She remembered everything. ‘I was shot in the shoulder too, and lost consciousness.’
‘They don’t send girls into battle,’ stated Sanderson Minor. ‘You’re lying.’ He aimed another spit ball to flick at her with his ruler.
‘Shut it, Sanderson,’ said Montrose quietly. ‘My brother’s at home now, wounded. He says there’s girls and women all along the front, ambulance drivers, cooks, signallers, nurses.’
‘What would he know?’
‘A girl pulled him out of a burning plane last year. An Australian. Burned her hands and face.’
‘I’ve never seen your brother,’ said Sanderson Minor uncertainly.
‘Doesn’t go outside much,’ said Montrose grimly. ‘People stare.’
Jean took advantage of the silence. ‘Who can translate the following phrase? “Garçon, ce chasseur de poulet est fait de rat.”’
Someone’s hand went up. ‘Waiter, this chicken chasseur is made of rat.’
A small sea of smiles ran through the class.
Jean smiled approval. ‘“Puis-je vous apporter autre chose, madame?”’
‘May I get you something else, madame?’ offered Montrose.
‘“Oui, s’il vous plaît, une autre portion du rat,”’ Jean replied.
‘Yes, please, another serving of the rat,’ said Sanderson Minor quietly.
‘“Toutes mes excuses, madame, mais le rat était tout petit,”’ said Jean.
‘Apologies, madame, but the rat was very small . . .’
A few boys grinned tentatively back at her as Montrose translated. There were few supercilious faces staring at her now.
‘“Le navire sur lequel j’étais a été coulé par des torpilles, mais j’ai survécu,”’ Jean added.
No hands came up for that one, so she translated it herself. ‘The ship I was on was sunk by torpedos, but I survived. All the other women in my group died,’ she added.
The boys obeyed her after that. She thought, after a while, they respected and even liked her, and they were certainly learning to speak French.
Her hand ached. Her heart ached. Alan had never said he loved her, either. All he’d done was hold her hand. Maybe he’d held it in case she tripped, but no, she knew that wasn’t the reason.
Perhaps he’d already had a sweetheart by the time she met him again in France. Maybe if they’d been together longer she’d have seen a letter arrive for him from a girl back home. He’d never even kissed her, and not because he’d have risked court-martial if he had, but because they’d had no chance, no time that was theirs alone, so little time at all. There had been no other girl. She knew it, deep within her, just as she knew he had loved her too.
At last she told Mama about him, as they wiped the dishes after dinner, for they only had a daily to do the rough now. Mama held her close. ‘We thought there was someone,’ she admitted. ‘We guessed that he . . . he would not come back.’
No letters had come from a young man, and Mama must know Jean hadn’t written any. Many girls wrote letters to soldiers they had never met, chatty letters under the respectable guidance of the vicar. A girl who wrote to no man these days had a reason not to write.
The battles still played out on the fields of France and Flanders and Palestine, but the armies were tiring too. Everyone these days was tired. Women knitted, bellybands, balaclavas, support bandages for amputated limbs, socks, gloves, fingerstalls. Jean tried to knit, but her hand was too clumsy, and too painful as well. Each new day seemed to eat the one before, each day so much the same, no days to look forward to. The war would last forever.
Until, somehow, it didn’t.
The war stopped, not with a win and a treaty, but with a ceasefire. At least the guns no longer fired.
The school and church bells rang through the school and village, clang clang clang and dong dong dong, in joyous discord.
Mama played the piano in the school hall. Students and staff sang ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ and then they danced. Jean danced with old Mr Poggleston, old ‘Piggie Ears’ the Latin master, who held her maimed hand as if he noticed nothing strange. The boys danced with each other along the corridors, in the classroom. The bells kept ringing. At last Jean ducked into the staffroom lavatory to get away from them.
They will not ring for me, she thought, sitting on the toilet lid, not for a wedding, nor for a funeral. I am not dead. I only feel as though I am.
But she tried to live. She made plans, now the war was over, or there was a ceasefire, which for now was good enough. She wondered for a while if she should contact Alan’s family, but she would be breaking her oath if she told them how they had met, and anything she said would either be too little, or too much.
One day I will, she told herself. One day when the war is truly over, I can tell them how their son died. I’ll let them know about his bravery and his kindness, how he almost changed the whole course of the war. But not yet.
She would buy a motor bicycle and tour the Highlands, but with what? She had almost no money, nor any job. Her parents were happy to support her at home, but she was sure they wouldn’t buy her a motor bicycle. Nice girls did not do things like that. She would not find a real job as a teacher now, with so many men returning to their jobs. In a few months, at most, a man would replace her at the school.
But one day she noticed the red-gold sheen of sunlight on the last leaves clinging to the oak trees. She laughed at a young barn owl who hadn’t quite got the hang of ‘toowit toowoo’. That Friday night Papa suggested they sing around the piano again as Mama played, even though only three sang now, not five. The next week Mama asked Mrs Lambert who lived up the road to join them for dinner and music afterwards. Mrs Lambert had been widowed by the second Battle of the Somme.
Life seeped in at the edges, and then became a flow. Jean tentatively wondered if she should study for the university entrance exams, or train for a job teaching the very young children men mostly thought beneath their dignity to instruct. None of those plans seemed to fit though, like the clothes she had worn before the war, which she had had to take in a great deal. Perhaps her visions of the future needed to be trimmed and tucked as well.
She brought in a bunch of snowdrops to see Mama smile; asked Papa to read them skits from Punch. She saw that her parents were also working hard to give her joy, too. Both she and they wanted happiness for each other, and in working to give it, began to find it for themselves. The taste of marmalade on toast; crumpets with honey for tea; the gleam of ten jars of the hawthorn jelly she and Mama had made glowing red along the kitchen windowsill. Her damaged hand could still cook hawthorn jelly, and even hold a saucepan now. Its pain had lessened too.
These things were good.
And then one grey, low-skyed day in late January as she came home laden with exercise books to mark she saw a motor bicycle parked outside the door. Mama met her in the hall, Mama without her apron on. Mama looking truly happy, even excited.
‘Do your hair, quickly,’ she said a little breathlessly. ‘You have a visitor. He’s in the drawing room.’
Mama vanished to the kitchen, which was odd, leaving her daughter unchaperoned with a man. The vicar, perhaps, Jean thought, wanting help with the flower-arranging committee, or even one of the officers from France come to give condolences for her brothers.
She opened the door, and Alan stood up, and smiled at her.