JOHN ARTHUR IS SILENT as he drives swiftly along Horse Guards Parade and then on through clear barricaded side streets, past police road blocks and the edges of the crowds that are gathering along the Embankment for the vast fireworks display to come. No one turns to stare. The speeding, blank-windowed official car is commonplace in Modernist Britain.
“You enjoyed the show?”
“The show?” I look over at him.
He shakes his head, the lights forming and re-forming his face. “I mean all of it. These last few days…”
“I was hardly paying much attention.”
“Of course.” He pushes the car faster. “You were here to kill me…”
Drunk and jolly Tommies squat aside the lions as we pass Trafalgar Square, shouting down to their mates who are pissing or splashing merrily in the fountains. Everywhere, flags are being waved, people are leaning dangerously out from windows, couples are kissing deeply in shop doorways, lads are climbing lampposts. There will be deaths tonight. There will be conceptions.
“Look…” What do I call him? John? Francis? Sir? Mr. Arthur? None of his names belong. “I can’t plead with you. I’ve been through too much already. And I don’t mean,” I gesture vaguely at the car’s window, “just this…”
On through Covent Garden and across the Strand, then past the Inns Of Court. Fleet Street, with the front pages written and typeset—the news on this Trafalgar Day already made—is quiet, but we’re drawn to a halt by a knot of traffic around Saint Paul’s where there are flags and litter, twisted railings, and a man is vomiting onto the pavement. A taxi draws up beside us as we queue to get into Cheapside. Two women in evening clothes are talking animatedly in the back.
“Tell me this, though, Griff,” he says, his fingers clenching and unclenching on the wheel’s stitched leather. “Whatever made you think the world would change if there was no John Arthur?”
“Who would replace you?”
He inches the car forward. The back of a bus thrums ahead of us. I SHAN’T BE LONG—MOTHER’S USING SUNLIGHT. “You tell me.”
“Jim Toller’s too young—nobody trusts him. People like Smith and Mosley are second-rate politicians. They’d be second-rate under any leader. I suppose there was Harrison, but then he was conveniently executed for treason. We’ve all been laughing at William Arkwright for years…”
“You shouldn’t underestimate Bill Arkwright. I’ve kept him close to me because he’s the one person I can least trust. You’re wrong about it all, in fact, Griff. The military, the bloody establishment. They all want rid of me. They were happy enough when they thought that they could just buy a few more cars and whores and polish some extra medals. Without John Arthur, though…” He shakes his head. He sounds tired. His voice is toneless—the famous light Yorkshire accent is almost gone. “The point is that there has to be a John Arthur. There would be no point, no purpose, in destroying him. He’s something that’s been given to me—you understand that? I want you to understand, Griff. There’s a space called John Arthur into which this world has pushed me. I have been given destiny, Griff. Really, there was no choice…”
“You could cast it aside.”
This time, his laugh becomes more bitter. “I have to carry on. Why do you think I made that speech this evening? Why do you think this country has to fight? They’re afraid, Griff. All of them are afraid…”
Outside, as we move on, the traffic has cleared. We are turning away from the bustling swirl of the river. Looking back, I glimpse the great dome Saint Paul’s over the rooftops. As celebratory searchlights begin to wheel around it, extinguishing the stars, barring the sky, it seems to glow and rise as if held aloft by clouds. Then the light flares and the vision is gone, and the roads grow narrower, uglier. Soon, we are in Whitechapel; since the days of the Ripper, since my own sad wanderings and the fights and burnings and intimidations of the twenties, and despite all the new overspill developments at Beacontree, little about the East End has ever changed.
“At least you’re still honest with me, Griff,” he says, looking over for longer than feels comfortable as the big car rushes along these cramped little streets. “So few people are…” He makes a turn and the tyres squeal and slide across the wet cobbles, then rumble to the kerb of a dead end beside a scrap of wasteground. The engine stops. He jerks on the handbrake.
“Can you manage to walk a while, Griff…?”
Clinging to my dignity, not waiting for him to come and help me, I climb slowly out. It’s cold and dark here. The ground is sticky with litter and the air has a faintly seasidey smell of coal smoke and river silt. Even where the houses begin, the dim street lamps are widely-spaced. John Arthur opens the car’s rear door and takes a hat from the back seat—an ordinary-looking trilby—then a dark overcoat, which he pulls on, raising the collar. “There,” he says, holding out his arms, pantomiming a turn in the middle of this empty road. “Who would recognise me?”
My walk is slow and laboured as we head towards the houses. John Arthur helps me by snaking his arm around my back and hooking it across my shoulders to support some of my weight, and gives me a little lift as we step over a pothole and up onto the loose beginnings of a pavement. In odd, flashing moments, he feels almost like Francis—although I thought I’d forgotten what Francis ever felt like. His breathing and the way he walks is almost the same, and his skin, beneath it all, beneath everything, still smells faintly of burnt lemon.
Something grey that is too low and quick to be a cat darts into an alley that on warmer days would be filled with washing, but there’s no one about and the only lights that show from the windows of these terraces are television grey. The morning’s drum and fife bands have long gone. The teas have been cleared, the tatters of ribbon and bunting hang limp, the paper union jacks that the children made at school lie torn in the puddles.
Soon, we’re drawing close to the sidings, the tracks and the cliff-face brick warehouses of the docks. It’s quiet here tonight, but in my head dropped iron clangs, steam rises, sacks of produce from all the Empire slump and pile as the giant cranes turn and nod in God-like approval. And there’s that sound again, that dull rumble gathering at the back of my teeth and in the void that waits to fill my skull when my brain finally evaporates. It’s in the boom of guns, the rumble of tank tracks, the drone of aircraft engines, the crash and sigh of masonry, the scream of children, the churning of great machines, the grey roar of an angry sea…
“For all those years,” I say as John Arthur helps me along the brick-cobbled street and the sky over London suddenly fractures into light. “I thought you were dead. It destroyed your parents—did you know that? Putting up a headstone years later isn’t enough…”
“Don’t try to tell me what happened, Griff—as if you know more than I do about my life.”
I blink stupidly as the fireworks roar and the shadows colour and change, suddenly close to tears.
“I loved you once…”
His face is close to mine. His arm squeezes my waist as he helps me along. “I know that too.”
We’re drawing close to humanity again. Locals who’ve wandered out from their homes to gather where there’s a view beyond the piers where the Thames glitters and the sky fizzes, churns, explodes. Mothers in slippers with scarves wrapped over their curlers are holding up their youngest for as long as their arms will last. The men have fags behind their ears and the stubble of a day off work peppering their chins. Their collars are off and many are in vests, flabby arms showing tattoos: MUM. IRIS. WEST HAM. They ohh and ahh as the sky crackles and the colours shine in gutters and ignite the myriad panes of warehouse windows. No one notices John Arthur as he and I slip between them. He’s just a slight middle-aged man helping his invalid father.
Beyond, a little away from the crowd where the river can no longer be seen, some tea chests lie heaped beside a wall where a few loose posters, grainy and grey, cling like bats. LONDON, CAPITAL OF EMPIRE. ORIENT LINE. VISIT JAMAICA. I slump down even though the air is sour here with the stink of dog excrement that pervades all such places and the wood is wet. John Arthur sits beside me. In shadow, he risks taking off his hat, and gestures towards the crowd. “They all seem so happy,” he says. “A few drinks, a bed, food, some flesh to hold, some bloody fireworks…”
“They worship you.”
“Do they? You tell me, Griff. You’re the historian. Why would anyone follow John Arthur?”
“Because you offer them certainty.” I cradle my arm, one half of me wanting to draw closer to him, the other wishing I was far, far away. “Because you tell them whom to hate and love.”
“Is that all they want from him?” He looks at me challengingly then, does this ex-lover of mine who once used to gasp as he emptied himself into me—does this John Arthur. Something chill and terrible runs down my spine. A shock that’s almost the opposite of recognition. Now, powerless as I am, I’m sure that I was right to try to kill him.
“You don’t understand what it was like,” he says. “You weren’t in the War.”
“I thought I’d lost a friend.”
“We all lost friends—do you think I didn’t? But it’s not enough, is it? After what we went through. I thought it might be enough when I first visited Dublin after the victory. And then again when word came through from Rhodesia.” He shakes his head as sulphurous plumes of red smoke drift over London. “You don’t know what the War was like, Griff. No one did who wasn’t there…”
He’s leaning forward now, eyes fixed on nowhere as the flashes of light catch and die over the planes of his face, the silver of his hair, his elbows resting on his knees as he grips the rim of his hat, turning it over.
“It was all so easy when I enlisted,” he says. “There were men chatting with each other on the train as that took us down to this big park north of Birmingham. Suddenly we were all the same—bosses and labourers…
“We came just exactly as we were, Griff. Dressed in the clothes we’d arrived in at the station. We thought we’d all be given uniforms…” He chuckles. The fireworks spit and crack. “We were expecting those bloody uniforms for weeks. There were men dressed in their Sunday best doing bayonet practice with broom handles, or the overalls they’d worn at the factory. We slept in tents from the Crimea. But we were proud of what we were, Griff. We didn’t care what the rest of the world thought because we knew we were right…” He shakes his head.
“I was a rifleman, Griff. Third best shot in the training battalion when the Lee Enfields finally arrived. I even found that I wasn’t bad at boxing. Entered the competitions they organised to keep us busy, and was runner up without even trying. Perhaps that was the trick.
“We went to France in December as part of Kitchener’s First Army. The regular soldiers thought we were a joke, called us the greys because our khaki was the wrong shade. It itched like hell when it got wet—the stuff was made for horse blankets—and you could see us coming a mile off. South Staffordshires. C Company. 89th Battalion. I remember hearing the first sound of the big guns. Boom, boom. Even when it’s far off, Griff, it’s a bigger, deeper noise than you’d ever imagine. I didn’t know if it was theirs or ours, but the sound was somehow reassuring. I was a soldier at last—I was there…
“Don’t believe any of the bloody rubbish about King and Regiment and Country. We didn’t care who we were fighting. It could have been the French or the Hun or the Belgians—we hated them all. We hated them almost as much as we hated the cavalry waiting behind the lines and the staff officers and the pay corps. You fight, Griff, for the bloke who’s standing next to you. You put up with all the mud and the lice and the officers and the regimental bullshit for their sake. If you’re lucky, perhaps there’s someone back at home as well. But there was never anyone like that for me. I’m sorry, Griff—there simply wasn’t, and I ended up being grateful for that because I saw what happened to the others. The letters from your girl going on about some new bloke that got shorter and shorter and then stopped coming at all. How could we possibly tell any of you what it was like after that, Griff—you civilians? How could you ever know?”
“It must have been terrible.”
“It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t terrible at all. I’ve never laughed more in my life, or felt more wanted, more as if I belonged. The rain. The rats. The mud. It was all like some stupid practical joke. And it was quiet a lot of the time and there were empty fields where the corn had grown wild and you could lie down in the evening and stare up at a perfect sky. Then down to the town, most us of half-drunk already, and the fat white mademoiselles spitting on their fingers and saying laver vous. Yes, Griff, I did that too. And I had friends, mates, encounters. There were places—the back of the cookhouses, other odd corners. Nobody cared. Everything was accepted as long as you kept it out of the noses of the officers and did your job. But for me love—sex—whatever you call it, just faded. Perhaps it had never been there…” He stares down, his silvered head bowed as the rockets whoosh and wheel, scrawling out the sky.
“We were sent to the Somme in June 1916. It was supposed to be the big push that would win the War, but we knew that we were just covering a cock-up that the French had made. I remember hearing the guns as we marched along this road behind the flour wagons. And for the first time, after over a year of fighting and hearing shells and being shot at, I felt afraid…
“It’s terrible, you know, Griff. Feeling afraid when you know that fear’s the only logical reaction. Nerves—they’re okay, every soldier gets nerves when something’s about to start. But fear, real fear—what we called funk—it freezes you up. It means you’re no longer working for the man next to you.
“I lay awake that last night. We knew we were going over the top in the morning. Not that they told you, but you could tell from the guns. I couldn’t sleep. Boom, boom, and the stink of the trenches. Boom, boom, boom. That great iron voice. The sergeant came around before dawn with diamonds of felt to sew into the sacking of our helmets so that the rest of the Regiment would know who we were. About twenty of us had to share one needle and thread, and my hands were so useless that I had to get someone else to do mine. I could barely breathe, but they all thought it was just Frannie’s nerves, which was alright, because they all felt nerves. They weren’t afraid. Not the way Frannie Eveleigh was. They didn’t know funk, fear. They were laughing, joking, humming some stupid tune under their breath when the captain came to tell us we were getting a chance to have a go at the Hun and how much it all mattered to the King and Lloyd George and the whole bloody country. I felt sorry for him, too. The snipers and machine gunners always went for the officers first.
“The big guns stopped, and that silence was the worst thing of all. I felt as though I was watching myself. Frozen. I didn’t know if I could go over the top, although I was sure I’d be court martialled and shot if I didn’t. But that wasn’t enough—the threat of some other kind of death a few weeks later.
“Then the guns started again. Boom, boom. The sound seemed to cover us like a blanket and then this vast final massive earth-shaking boom that was a land mine the sappers had planted under the German trenches. Then we were moved up to the front line. Thousands, thousands of us. And there was silence, just men breathing and the shuffle of our feet on the duckboards and the creak and jingle of our packs. And we stared at the last sandbags ahead of us and the ladders that had been laid against them. And we waited. It was too late for joking now. It was too late for anything. The officers checked their watches and someone blew a whistle about a mile off. Then another whistle blew closer and you could hear the sound coming towards you like a train.
“Men started to climb out of the trenches—I watched them go ahead of me. Some were yelling the way you were supposed to and some went quietly and some prayed. A lot of them just fell back and I thought they were being clumsy until I realised they’d been shot already. Guns were clattering and you could tell from the sound that they weren’t ours. The Germans were firing straight back at us as soon as we stuck our bloody heads over the top. And I just stood there. It was the worst moment of my life but I knew I couldn’t go back, so I started to climb up out of that trench. I went over into the morning with the sky suddenly big above me. My mates were already running around the pool of a big shell hole far ahead—I could just catch their voices on the wind. And Boom boom. Rat-a-tat-tat as they were cut down one by one. I was just wandering in a nightmare. I wasn’t running. I wasn’t even sure if my feet were moving…
“I don’t know when I got hit, Griff—or how long it took. It just felt as if something had pushed against me and there was this heat across my side as I slid down into this long hollow. The mud came up around my waist and I knew then that I was hit because I could see these trails of blood fanning out like roots through the algae. But I knew it wasn’t that bad. I could touch myself there and it barely hurt. I should have gone on, Griff. I should have climbed out of that ditch and gone on. But I didn’t. I just crouched there the whole day. I was shivering, weeping. Boom, boom—I could hear the shells whistling over. The bullets rattling. But I was alone with my fear, Griff. Quite alone.
“Darkness came and the flares went up and the guns still boomed and crackled, although you knew that the German snipers would aim high most of the time at night to give the rescue parties a chance. I tried to get up then, but the sides of the ditch were slippery and my left side seemed to have frozen. Then I heard voices close by and I shouted back. Men with stretchers found me and hauled me out. I was muddy and blood-sodden and I looked enough of a mess to be convincing as I was carried back to the field dressing station.
“Everything there smelled of shit and mud and iodine and dying men. The soldier on the stretcher beside me kept trying to talk, but even when I managed to turn myself over to see more of him, I couldn’t work out what he was saying. The words he was making seemed to begin with a K and then an M, but the sound was more like something caught in his throat. His uniform was dry—there was hardly any blood on it. He didn’t even seem to be wounded. Then I moved myself up some more until I could see his other side, and that the right side of his skull had been smashed away like the top of an egg. His right eyeball was just lying there it in its socket like some anatomical drawing, his jaw was shattered and his tongue was embedded with bits of his teeth. It didn’t make any sense for him to be alive at all. I suppose that was why they’d just left him here—because they expected him to die.
“The two eyes, the good one and the bad, were staring up at me. I felt his hand flapping at mine, and I looked down and saw that he was trying to point towards a pistol he had strapped to his belt. I understood then what he’d been trying to say, which was Kill Me. Kill Me. It was the kind of favour you’d do for any mate at a time like that—and one that you’d hope someone else would have the guts to do for you. No one would have noticed a single pistol shot, not here in all this mess where the guns were still loud. But I knew that I couldn’t do it.
“I just lay back and stared up at the lantern as this soldier beside me gagged and moaned, knowing that this was funk, this was fear, that I was worthless as a soldier. I was feverish by the time I was tagged and looked at inside the treatment tent. I was given some water and a jab of morphine and quinine and carried across the fields to a big river barge just as dawn was coming. It was supposed to provide an easier journey for the casualties to the back-of-the-line hospital, but it was slow, and there were no windows down inside the hold. You could still smell the coal that they’d cleared out of the barge beneath all the other stench, and you could hear the water laughing around the sides as we pulled away from the jetty.
“A few men were crying and moaning. A lot were comatose or simply asleep. But we all knew that we were travelling somewhere—those of us who knew anything. Back to life, I suppose. Or death. The man with the half-blown off head was on the pallet nearest to me, and for a while he was quiet and I thought he’d given up the clicking and moaning and had perhaps died at last, but then his whole body gave a spasm and he started it all up again. It was terrible this time. He wasn’t even trying to speak. His limbs were jerking and this noise he was making just went on and on. It was a sound out of hell.
“It was too late, by now, to use his gun. But I managed to undo the straps of my pallet and stand up though my head was swimming. He seemed to quieten for a moment then, and look back up at me with his good eye. I took strength from that. In fact, it seemed as if was his strength that enabled me to take the blanket from by his feet and ball it up and push it down hard over his face and hold it there. Of course, he began to fight and buck after a while—it’s what happens when you’re dying, you can’t help it. And it takes longer than you’d imagine to kill a man even when he’s wounded. But eventually he stopped struggling. I was shivering and in tears as I finally lifted the blanket from him. And I was glad that I still had this one soldierly act left in me, even if I’d left it much too late. I knew that he’d died a hero’s death, this man. This soldier. This nameless friend…
“The boat was rocking and my fever was surging back into me again. Perhaps it was that or the drugs I’d been given which made me do what I did. I don’t know. I remember thinking that he had black hair like mine, that he had blue eyes, and what would have been a square jaw before the bullet wrecked it. A thinner kind of face. I felt for the waxed envelope that they’d tied to his tunic at the dressing station. His name was John Arthur, and he was a private—a rifleman like me—in the Staffordshires, although from a different battalion. It struck me that John Arthur was a good name for a soldier, a good name for a man. I’d always hated being Francis Eveleigh—it said everything about the pretensions of my parents and nothing at all about me. I suppose I thought I might be able to lose the fear and the funk if I had a name like that, although at the time as I undid my own envelope and tied it to him and felt for his pay book and swapped it with mine and somehow even lifted his identity tags over his head, I really didn’t know what I was thinking. It was all done for that moment, in the foul air of that barge with the water laughing beside me, just to see how it felt to become him. And straight away, you know, as I lay down again on my pallet and the fever began to take a bigger hold, I felt better…
“When I woke up in the room of a chateau that had been requisitioned as a hospital, the nurses who walked by and tucked at my sheets and cleaned me up called me John. And that seemed right. It was the most natural thing in the world to be John…”
John Arthur is silent for a moment as the sky above London foams with light and the fireworks display reaches its climax, glinting on the bricks, pushing at us like a wind, catching emerald and ruby pinpoints in his eyes and the wetness of his lower lip. The firecrackers are going boom boom boom.
“It’s not that unusual,” I say, “for people to undergo some sort of change if they’ve been near to death.”
“But you have to see it from inside, Griff. I was different. I had changed. Francis Eveleigh really did die that day in the Somme.”
“Didn’t anyone ever suspect?”
“The rest of my platoon had been wiped out. So had John Arthur’s. And I caught pneumonia, you see, Griff, so I was shipped back to England and a sanatorium. By the time I was finally ready for active service six months later, I could have been anyone for all the difference it made. John Arthur never got any letters, and I found out from his file that he had no wife, no loved ones, no family. No one who cared about him apart from me.
“So I went back to the front as S4538 Rifleman Arthur, D Company 7th Service Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, and I knew from the first time I heard the guns that this time it would be better, this time I wouldn’t feel any fear. I was even made corporal, which was something Francis Eveleigh would never have become. I won the George Cross… But that’s common knowledge, isn’t it?”
“What was it like when the War ended?”
“It was the end of everything. People in the streets back in England looked away from you. They blamed us soldiers for losing the War. I don’t know. I suppose that in our hearts we felt the same. I used to blame myself for defiling the name of this man, this John Arthur. He deserved more than I’d been able to give him. This empty country, this lost War.
“I went up to Raughton, which was John Arthur’s last address before enlisting. I found out that the Yorkshire accent I’d copied from one of the cooks was all wrong, but that didn’t matter. We were like ghosts. Nobody seemed to belong anywhere then. The place was just a pit village and the address was a cheap boarding house. I stayed there for a few weeks, finding out a bit more about this person—this John Arthur. One or two people told me they remembered him, but I never really knew if they did. He’d been older than me, but seemed to have made little impression on the world, almost as if he’d been waiting for the War to start. His father had been an itinerant who’d started out in the West Country and had died in a mining accident. One day I went across to the foundry in the next valley in search of work…
“The place was just like everywhere else, and virtually derelict now that the War orders had gone. But the woman in the office who looked down at my name said she remembered me. There was no work going, but she offered to put me up for a while, and I accepted. I didn’t have the money to pay for the boarding house much longer anyway.”
“That was Mrs. Framley?”
“Enid Framley. She used to put lodgers up in the spare bedroom, and John Arthur had stayed with her for a few weeks before he enlisted. From the first moment she saw me, she just accepted me as him. She said John and her son Billy had become friends. Of course, Billy had enlisted too, and was killed at Ypres. So I stayed at Enid Framley’s and she fed me up and helped me find the occasional bit of work, and around the fire in the evenings we’d talk about how it had once been, those golden times before the War with me and her son Billy. She liked me to call her Auntie. I really do think she believed the stories that we made up on those evenings together, me and Billy out cycling the hills, or fishing on summer evenings at the millpond.
“But I knew I had to do something more with this new life John Arthur had given me. Do you understand that, Griff? Living in England then was a nightmare and all I had was this man’s name. So I jumped on a cattle truck, took the train down to London. I’d never been there before, but thousands of men like me had found their way here because there was nowhere else to go. Many of them ended up starving. It was cold that winter and there was the flu epidemic. Each morning under the bridges and in the shop fronts, they’d be a few bodies extra that didn’t wake up. And the men in suits and the women in hats who’d never done anything but complain about the rationing just wrinkled their noses and stepped over them. I was lucky. I’d boxed in the army as Francis and there were always people prepared to pay to watch men hit each other. Queers like you, Griff, used to gasp and hold their hands over their faces as if they couldn’t bear to watch. And the fat cats and the Jews. Women wearing stoles who’d sit near the ring and then complain if they got flecks of blood on them. And the bright young things. And the colonels who were back from the War without a scratch, jingling with medals and a big pension. And the stupid socialists who wanted to rescue us all and turn us into smock-coated peasants. This country was in a sick mess in the twenties, Griff. It was a ghost country, it had lost itself.
“But I still remembered I was John Arthur. And I began to meet people who understood that there was nothing left in all the lies that had once kept this country afloat, people who knew that we would have to fight again if anything was ever going to change. The War was still going on, Griff. We soldiers had brought it back with us, just the way you civvies had feared. We still carried it in us—boom, boom, the sound of those guns—and the battle lines were drawn across the country for anyone who cared to notice. And the thing was, I found that if I spoke up and said what I thought, people would listen. If I shouted, they would become silent. If I raised my hand and pointed, they would go the way that I sent them. You saw what it was like—Griff, that night fifteen years ago. You saw how easy it is to be John Arthur. He was always waiting there. Always. This figure. Even now, he’s leading me on…”
John Arthur shakes his head. The big display is reaching its climax, and the stars have been extinguished by vast man-made clouds that drift amid green and red forests of splintered light. Even here, what must be two miles off, there’s a sweet-sour reek of gunpowder as the flares blossom overhead. He puts his trilby hat on, straightens it, checks that his coat collar is still up and offers me his hand again. “Come on, Griff, I’ll buy you that drink. It’s not far…”
I let him help me up, and as he does so, an elderly woman in a hairnet and a house coat glances back across the road from the watching crowd. Her hand goes up to her mouth for a moment, childlike in wonder. Could it really be Him over there? But no, no… It couldn’t be, could it? Relieved, she looks towards the crackling sky again.
John Arthur and I shuffle beside the docks and turn down a different side road where a dog is barking inside a house, terrified by the blaze and racket. He breathes easily beside me, helping me along as I wonder what I should say, what horrors I could tell him that he doesn’t already know, what questions should I ask. But it’s like all those letters that I never wrote to him, and the words I used to feel fading from my lips as I awoke. It’s like sitting out with the Cumbernalds in the green darkness of Penrhos Park and saying yes, yes, I once knew John Arthur. It’s like all the promises of love that, even in that brief, glorious time when Francis and I were alone in our turf-roofed cottage by the shore, were never given. It’s like my unwritten book. It’s like my whole life.
The sky is on fire now. The individual crackles and pocks and explosions have become one vast single roar. The houses look flash-lit, pushed back into skeletons of their real selves. I stumble as the tablets fade from my blood and renewed pain shoots through me. Our two linked shadows leap, burned and frozen ahead into the pavement, and it seems that we’re at the lip of a vast wave that will soon break through everything, dissolving, destroying. Then, with one last final bellow, the display ends and we move on through the East End, the ordinary East End of London in this night of the 21st of October 1940 beneath a bruised sky, in shocked, blotchy darkness.
A public house juts at the triangular meeting of the two streets facing towards the Mudchute and the Isle of Dogs. It’s a storey higher than the terraces that join it, but of the same grim make and age. The faded paint on the brickwork reads FULLERS ALES. The sign hanging below is unilluminated, painted in darker colours. If I didn’t know this place already, I probably wouldn’t be able to make out the words COTTAGE SPRING.
John Arthur lifts the latch and holds the door for me, and the room inside is smaller than the place I remember stumbling into after my violent tryst on that scrap of wasteground exactly fifteen years ago. But I recognise the shape of the counter that John Arthur had leapt onto, and the pattern of the mirror, now cracked, that lies behind it. I recognise the frosted windows engraved FINE BEER AND ALES; there, even, is the fat pillar in the corner that I hid behind. This is still the Cottage Spring. It’s simply my memory that’s been twisted.
There’s a moment of bizarre normality as John Arthur takes off his hat, lowers his coat collar, walks up to the bar, rests his elbow, and turns to ask me what I’d like to drink. The barman is polishing a glass, two cloth-capped men are playing darts in a smoggy corner, a drunk is lounging asleep on a bench, whilst three underage lads sit nursing their pints, and an old man stares at his evening glass of stout. They’re some of the few who couldn’t be bothered to see tonight’s fireworks, or even watch them at home on telly, and it’s amusing to observe their reactions as they realise who’s just come in. There’s puzzlement, doubt—like that old woman by the docks in her house coat—followed by that standard British reluctance to acknowledge the unusual: and the desire to hold back, not to make a fuss.
“I’ll buy everyone their next round,” John Arthur says, looking around at them and speaking with that soft Yorkshire accent as the air drops into awe-struck silence: the very image of himself. “There aren’t that many of you here. I think I can afford it… What’ll it be?”
Suddenly, they’re all clustered around him, breathless and eager like children at a fete when Father Christmas finally arrives. Believing, not believing, wanting to get close, yet still too amazed to touch. And needing, needing. John Arthur signs beer mats with a stubby pencil used to keep the score at cribbage, he laughs and shares a joke. He’s really John Arthur now, and these are his people. Even the ones who’d never ever have voted for him can’t help but want to share the dream when it’s this close. The old man downs the rest of his stout, spilling most of it down his shirt, and quavers that he’d like another. The lads ask for halves of ginger beer, which John Arthur laughingly changes to the pints of Fullers’ that they were on before. The drunk remains asleep on the bench in the corner; what a joke the world will have on him in the morning…
Outside, word of who’s here must have got out; there are children’s and women’s voices, and the shadows of raised hands and heads shift across the long frosted windows. Pleading fingers squeal over the panes. And I’m just standing here, tired and in pain. Drained of hope. Drained of anger. I shuffle closer to that pillar at the end of the bar, in need once more of its reassuring anonymity. If I could get behind it, it’s not far to the door, and even on a night such as this there must be buses and taxis that would take me back to central London; I could escape. John Arthur’s forgotten about me anyway. These are his people. This is where he belongs. I’m just a name from the past that he couldn’t remember well enough to get right when he made his first speech to the Parliament that he later dissolved. A phone begins to ring at the back of the pub, seemingly unanswered. Somewhere, a car engine is racing.
Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps there had to be a John Arthur, and I was wasting my time imagining that I could ever change anything. Perhaps if that bullet had bit closer and Francis Eveleigh really had bled out his life at the Somme, some other solider would have risen to stand feared and adored in this East End pub, and a fool like me might be too confused and afraid to love or hate him.
The voices of the men who stand around John Arthur are easier now. Their postures have grown more relaxed. Yes, they realise, he really is just as everyone says he is; an ordinary bloke you could share a drink with. This will be a story they’ll tell to their grandchildren in the long days ahead when the squares of striped lawn turn ever greener and the roads entwine and the suburbs marry in playgrounds and clean neat streets where everything ugly and unwanted has been destroyed.
John Arthur looks over from the men clustered around him as the roar of an approaching car fills the street. He seems to notice me now almost as he did all those years ago when I stood amid those angry men. It’s as if nothing has ever changed. But this time, somehow, his smile is more genuine, and as he walks over with his arms a little apart, saying, “Griff, what am I doing, I haven’t even got you that drink…?” I can’t help but smile back.
There comes a sharp sound of banging, and the thought passes, too quickly to be fully-formed, that the fireworks have resumed, or that some of the lads outside are tossing firecrackers. Then, one by one, the frosted windows of the Cottage Spring begin to fall in. They burst into shining veils, and splinters of wood fly out and the room explodes in a reflecting spray of shattered bottles and collapsing mirrors. The tide sweeps left to right towards me, tearing the world apart. The men gathered at the bar spin around, are jerked, thrown back, lifted. The glass is like a great watery tide, rolling and rising, incredibly immense. John Arthur pirouettes as the last window explodes. His hands spin out and the shining air flowers silver and red around him, then the rain of glass sweeps on and the pillar I’m beside splatters and streams. Then everything stops and there’s sudden, terrible silence, filling slowly with a weeping haze of dust, the reek of spilled beer and whisky, the musical tinkling of the last splinters of glass.
After that, as I look down at this shattered place and these broken dolls lying on the crimsoned linoleum, there comes a sudden crash as the last of the big mirrors falls, and faint, at the very edge of everything, too frail as yet to be really believed, are the sounds of crying, fumbling, moaning, weeping. Then the roar, once again, of that car. Gears smash as it turns, and I wait for more bullets as the agitated air swirls, but instead something large and metallic flies through the gaping windows. A thick, round-cornered box with a single wire protruding, it hits an upended table with a crack and skids hissing through the wet sparkling wreckage to settle beside Francis’s body.
The car pulls away with a screech of tyres before everything breaks into darkness.