The sky shivers with fever and there are devils on the roofs of the public houses. Father, hear the prayer we offer. Outside the White Lion two old men stand watching me with cigarettes. My footsteps are thunder. Incoming! Incoming! But no-one moves. A tram rolls along. PINK’S JAMS. A woman holds a little baby. Their eyes are black glass. Haresnape, Raw, Kaye, Jubb, Jarrett, Stansfield, Horne. Come and see, say the devils on the roofs. Come and see.
I was brown as a nut under the dirt.
There was a man called Onion, Private John Onion. He got trenchfoot and was posted back to France. I never really knew him.
Huddersfield has been emptied of men. Hung up like a rug on a line and beaten until all the fleas fell out. Sparrows dance in the dust to music I can’t hear.
‘Do they feed you?’ mother said, as she washed my back with the long brush. Yes, they feed us. Have you made friends? Yes, I have made friends. Is it very dangerous? Do you take care? I take care. Do you pray?
Christ laughs in the clouds above the bus station.
I may not be very well. How can one be sure?
‘You’re wanted in the orderly room,’ an orderly said.
‘What?’
‘Are you Gillray?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’re wanted in the orderly room.’
‘Now?’
‘Sooner.’
I went down there and the adjutant said You’re going on leave, Private Gillray. Eight days. Now? I said. Jolly old Blighty, said the adjutant.
Pigeons rise into the sky and vanish in the light.
*
‘First one’s on the house,’ the landlord said, in the Blue Ball. A long dragon’s face and fierce white collars. Teeth yellow like old organ keys. ‘Only the first, mind. I’ve got a business to run.’ He laughed like a furnace.
I had never had beer before of course.
‘A good way to go broke,’ said a man at the bar, ‘giving ale away free to f___ war heroes.’
He was young. He wore a slack dirty suit and his hands were nervous and nimble on the bar counter. He smiled with a shabby mouth and showed a long tongue. I thought about killing him. Then the landlord spoke sharply – I didn’t catch the words – and he cringed like a dog hit with a stick. I sipped the beer and heard the scraping of the devils’ feet on the roof.
‘What was that?’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you hear it?’
He said it was just the joists, or if not the joists the pipes.
This is the hard thing: that no-one else seems to hear, and no-one else seems to see. This is what makes what might otherwise only be sad or strange into something more like tragedy or (better) a stage farce.
All this funny business going on in one room and all the company in another room, none the wiser, oblivious.
I drank the beer quietly. It was sweet and thick and bitter. Forgive our foolish ways. Reclothe us in our rightful mind. All that time in France and then in Italy and never a drop. Teetee. Here he is, Teetee! Roll out the ginger ale. Crack open the lemon water, Teetee’s got a thirst on. I wasn’t bothered.
I imagined the devils’ feet dislodging old slates.
After that I walked along to Chapel Street. I walked to Chapel Street with beer on my breath.
*
FP Number Two: the soldier’s ankles and wrists are bound in fetters and cuffs, but he is free to move, free to march. His pay is withheld and he is given the hardest jobs to do (I won’t say hard labour because it is all hard labour).
They gave my cousin Frank FP Number One. Fettered and cuffed and tied to a field gun for three hours in the sleet. There were two of them. The other man was supposedly a thief, and had taken some fellow’s personal effects.
He would not talk to Frank because Frank was a conchie. The bad thief, then, and not the penitent thief. If thou be Christ, save thyself and us! But Frank was no Saviour, of course. Just a conchie who wouldn’t follow orders.
I am in for FP Number Two. It won’t be bad. It won’t be anything.
Chapel Street. The sky is broken, the sandstone weeps. My feet know Chapel Street (my feet are wet with blood). I was baptised here. God knows me here. God sees me here. An old woman who knows me calls from across the street, Harold, Harold, but I hide my face, and she calls God bless you, Harold, and I think terrible things.
CROWSON’S POTTED MEATS Make Very Tasty Sandwiches! PARKINSON’S OLD FASHIONED BUTTER DROPS. Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown? A small boy waves from the tram window. There’s a queue of women out of the door of the butcher’s shop.
There’s a rat on the pavement.
Sudworth, Harrison, Holdsworth, Freedman, Widdup, Hogley, Heale, Green.
‘Hullo!’ says the rat. ‘Are you a soldier?’
Yes, I say.
‘Did you shoot anyone? Did you shoot a German?’
I certainly shot at a German or two.
‘Did you see a dead body?’
I kneel down (my hip aches) and gather up the rat in both my hands. The rat bites down on the fleshy part of my right hand. I shake him but he doesn’t let go.
‘Let go,’ I say.
He clings on. I think about dashing him to the stone paving. It wouldn’t be any more unkind or more bloody than what goes on in the butcher’s shop (through the glass I can see Mrs Andrassy the butcher’s wife weighing out a cut).
Instead I pull his tail.
‘Ow.’
‘Get off.’
A young woman appears.
‘Leave the brave man alone,’ she says, briskly. ‘Come along. Leave the brave soldier be.’
The rat releases his hold and drops to the ground.
He is not a rat any more. Perhaps he was never a rat.
I straighten up and look for the chapel. I’m afraid that the minister will see me. But God has seen me already of course. What is Mr Oughtibridge besides that, what is his authority? There is a great noise and my teeth rattle in my head. Look out, there! But no: this place is not that place. A young girl runs along with dirty ankle socks and a fat toy bear. What sounds like shelling is only thunder (what sounds like thunder is only the air in my skull, the echo in my bones). I sit on a step beside a bright clean milk bottle.
It’s an empty bottle but I long to drink from it. I want to drink its cleanness and its light.
After the thunder – it might not have been thunder – I seem to be seized or rather encapsulated by silence. I am inside a still glass Huddersfield. The light refracts strangely along the frozen prisms of North Gate, John William Street, King Street, New Street, Buxton Road. Between the tram lines a cat has killed a starling.
Is this what always happens when a man drinks beer?
I seem to see grey grass growing in the road. I seem to see the town empty, and not only emptied of the young men but of all the old men, too, and the boys and girls, the women, the cats and birds, where is the queue from the butcher’s, where is the butcher’s wife? I seem to swim in the blood of time. The trams are gone. Smoke clouds the glass. There is a future where there is no town here.
A tram, lurching into the silence. I wonder for a moment whether I will step out in front of it, in the full sight of God.
Who would true valour see, let him come hither!
BANK ON SUPER SHELL OIL.
*
It is not only the killing and it is not only the dying. It is a life of plagues.
Smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice! But it is not only the lice. Take to you handfuls of the ashes of the furnace, and it shall become small dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man – but it is not only the boils (we have boils, bad feet, piles, inflammation, it is not only German guns, it is not only German shells).
Fire rains down on us from the sky (Exodus nine, twenty-four) but it is not only that, it is not only the slaughter of the firstborn (even unto, said God, the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill), it is not only that.
It is not only that the soul wears thin.
We believe in the immortality of man’s soul – and yet this becomes hard, when the soul wears thin, like an old cake of soap, when you can feel it shifting uneasily in its place like a rotten tooth or a broken bone – by hardship, by extremity, by exposure, the soul is worn thin, and it is hard not to think (consider the action of the sea upon the sea-cliff, of the waves upon the the rock) that what might be worn down – what shapes might these times make of our souls, I wonder – might just as well be worn away.
I will go back tomorrow and face my FP Number Two. If I don’t go back they will only take me back. On the roofs the devils hoot and clap.
‘You’ll have some stories to tell at the end of it all, anyway,’ my mother said, passing me a towel.
‘People won’t want to hear it.’
‘Folk love a war story.’
‘They won’t be war stories.’
MILKMAID MILK-COCOA. Whoa! For Cocoa. ARROW COLLARS. MARSH’S SAUSAGE.
Another tram, bearing down on me like another day, rushing at me like all the days at once.
Richard Smyth 