Custard Tarts and Broken Hearts (51 page)

‘Well,’ Matty went on, ‘that American agent’s been after me again. I’m thinking of taking him up on his offer.’ Again the young girl looked hesitantly at her brother. Stirring in his seat, he looked at her blankly. ‘Well, it’s your life, Matty, you must do as you like.’

Matty’s face crumpled. Turning away, so Sam couldn’t see the tears on her face, she left them alone together. Nellie couldn’t believe what she’d witnessed. She guessed Matty had no intention of going to America but merely wanted Sam to protest, as he once would have done. Nellie decided enough was enough. She screwed up her courage.

‘Sam, I want to know what happened to you out there…’ She paused as the fire crackled and wind soughed down the chimney, filling the little kitchen with a burst of smoke. He poked the fire.

‘Needs sweeping,’ he said.

‘For God’s sake, Sam.’ She was getting angry. ‘I can’t pretend any more! You’re a different feller. Look at the way you’ve treated Matty and you’ve hardly said two words to Charlie since that boy came home. If you’d seen the hell he went through looking for you, you could at least show some interest in him! I know it’s the war but I think if you could just talk to me—’

He cut her off. ‘Well, you should know me by now, Nellie. I’m a quiet old stick at the best of times. Anyway, there’s things I don’t want to put in your mind, you’re better off not knowing. ’

He wasn’t angry; in fact, she would have welcomed some anger. Any feeling would have been better than this impenetrable shell. But what did she expect? He’d been away for most of the time they’d been courting. Perhaps she was now as much a stranger to him as he was to her. She remembered him as a soft boy, certainly far too soft on her and how she’d scorned him for so long. In the end she knew that what had attracted her was his goodness. He was a good man, one she knew would always do the right thing. She’d taken to studying that old photograph of him she’d carried all through the war. She could see in it now, the beginnings of the change, his face set and grim, trying to look like a hard man, but under the man’s uniform there had still been her Sam. As she bent down to kiss him goodnight, he turned his cheek to her. Standing up, she felt her heart shrivel a little.

‘Goodnight, love,’ she said, and, wishing she believed it more, ‘We’ve got all the time in the world for talking.’

But it was to be weeks before Nellie eventually found out that it had happened at Ypres. ‘Wipers’, Sam pronounced it, not because he didn’t know better but just because to give it a silly name might somehow diminish its horror. Like calling the devil ‘old nick’. But whatever it was called, it was at Ypres she’d been robbed of her Sam, the good man she’d grown to love. Oh, he had come back all right in body, the head wound that had left him unconscious for weeks all healed up. He still had all his limbs attached, eyes seeing, ears hearing, though he had grown deaf in the clamour of firing off a million shells a day. But however grateful she was to have him back, through the long winter weeks of 1918 she had become convinced it was a different Sam who’d returned from Flanders. His coldness, she was sure, wasn’t intended to wound, yet for her it bordered on cruelty. He hadn’t once told her he loved her since he’d got back. Now it was she who hung about him, waiting for a smile. And still he wouldn’t talk.

Then one sad day, towards the end of January, she made her decision. ‘The wedding’s off, Sam,’ she said.

He was sitting by the fire, reading the job adverts in the
South London Press
. He looked up sombrely and began slowly folding the newspaper, while she stood in front of him, waiting. The old Sam would have pleaded, perhaps even cried, at least asked for an explanation. Instead, he looked at her fixedly and said, ‘If you think that’s best, you must do what you want.’

‘How can you be so cold about it?’ she blurted out. ‘You’re not the same, Sam! I always liked you to be strong, but not hard. I know it’s the war’s done it. If you’d only tell me about it, maybe I could help you get back your old self.’

Sam shook his head. ‘Leave it, Nell!’ he shouted, flinging the paper aside. ‘I’ve told you there’s things happen in war that a woman’s got no business knowing. Now leave it alone, will you, for Christ sake!’

He’d never raised his voice to her before, and she recoiled. Although Nellie had learned early to stand up for herself and had carried her whole family through the war, what she loved about being with Sam was that she didn’t have to be the strong one all the time. He’d always had his soft side to others as well as her, but where she was concerned, he’d been unfailingly protective. This new, silent Sam now revealed a coldness she’d never imagined his warm heart could contain. He simply didn’t seem to care.

‘I’ll find lodgings somewhere else. I don’t want it to be awkward for you, Nell.’

He walked out, without another word, and she didn’t follow. He’d left his army greatcoat hanging over the back of the kitchen chair and as she picked it up, a small book fell out of the pocket. It was his army service book; it had a buff cover with
Royal Field Artillery. ‘C’ Battery Camberwell Howitzers
printed on the front. With it was a voucher for the return of his greatcoat, promising a pound if he took it to the receiving office at London Bridge Station. She put the voucher on the mantelpiece, then, sitting down by the fire with the coat over her knees, she opened the book. The light from the gas lamp revealed brown stains on the cover… blood? Was it Sam’s? Or maybe it was just from the mud at Ypres. Here, perhaps, was a speck of that slimy sea of clay and ooze into which her poor boy had vanished.

She knew she shouldn’t read it, but the temptation was overwhelming. If he hadn’t been such a closed book himself since he’d come back, maybe she would not have opened it. She angled the book up to the lamp. She read all the official entries, his enlistment date, his boyish signature. It was a sparse record of his four years. Training, posting to France, where in France? Just ‘in the field’, which field? A muddy, bloody one, with no name. Wounded early in 1916, he’d been sent to hospital and then back to the fighting. She remembered the day she’d come upon him in the bath. How sick she’d felt, seeing that scar snaking across his chest. Here it was recorded, so matter-of-factly. Then came the record of that leave in April 1916, when he’d been so passionate and asked her to marry him. Nellie smiled, remembering the excitement of walking out with her handsome soldier beau. She turned to the conduct sheet, all signed off as exemplary, until she reached October 1917; then came something that shocked her to the core. The model soldier had been charged with neglect of duty and locked up in an army prison.

She had to read it twice. Sam? Neglect his duty? Never! Desertion? No, she knew they shot them for that. But something had happened. Was this what was stopping him from talking? Was it guilt? What had her Sam done that warranted imprisonment? She had to know.

That evening, before she left for the Star, Nellie took Matty into her confidence. ‘Matty, I’ve called off the wedding.’

‘Oh, no, Nell, you can’t! He still loves you, I know he does!’

‘Well, I wish he’d tell me that himself. You wouldn’t know it, to hear him.’

‘I know he’s not been himself, but you could bring him back… don’t give up on him, Nellie, not after all you two have been through.’

Matty had more faith in her ability to get through to Sam than she had herself. But the girl was right: she couldn’t give up on him. She waited up for him, and when he came home, he looked more weary and sad than she’d ever seen him.

‘I’ve found a room with one of my old mates from Wicks’s,’ he said. ‘Can Charlie and Matty still stay here for a bit till they’re settled?’ he asked dully. Nellie’s heart twisted at the thought of breaking up her adopted family.

‘Don’t talk like that, Sam. This is their home.’

Sam sat himself in her father’s old chair. With one leg crossed over the other, foot swinging gently, he began rolling a cigarette. That was another thing he’d picked up out there: he’d come back a chain smoker. He stared blankly into the fire. Quietly, she sat down opposite him and placed the book on the arm of the chair.

‘I’m sorry, I read it. About you being locked up. What happened, Sam? Did you do something bad? Tell me. I won’t think none the worse of you. What does it mean, neglect of duty? You’re not one for breaking the rules.’

Sam looked into her eyes for a long moment, then he shook his head, as though he could shake away the memories held there. She took it as a dismissal.

‘All right, Sam,’ she said, getting up to leave. ‘I won’t trouble you no more with it. I always thought you was a good man, but if you can’t even tell me, it must have been pretty bad, whatever you did. Goodnight.’

As she turned away, suddenly Sam started to talk. ‘I’ll leave you to decide if it was a bad thing I did, Nell.’ His words were slow and heavy, as if he was struggling to get them out. ‘Bad and good got all topsy-turvy out there. It was hard to know, sometimes, which was which.’

Nellie watched as he took out his tobacco pouch and rolled yet another cigarette. He pinched the end, pulling out loose strands of tobacco, struck a match and watched the tip glow as he inhaled. She studied his beloved face, noticing again how its boyish smoothness had been etched by the sorrow of war. He no longer needed to play at being the hard man: the war had made him into one. Staring into the fire, he seemed to forget Nellie was there and his story began to pour out.

‘I think I
was
a good soldier, Nell, or as good as any. I did my duty, and I
wasn’t
a coward. I didn’t get locked up for desertion, they would have shot me for that! No, it was the horse. I did it for the horse.’

‘The horse?’ She couldn’t have been more surprised. ‘What happened with the horse, love?’

‘I called him Dandy Grey Russet. It wasn’t his army name, but we all gave our horses pet names. It was from one of those sayings me mum had, she’d call me in from the streets. “Let me wash that neck of yours, it’s dandy grey russet”, and she’d scrub till my skin was red raw, or she’d say, “That shirt needs a bloody good wash, it’s dandy grey russet!” Where it came from, I couldn’t tell you… it just meant that shade of grey, you know, when things need a wash.’

Nell smiled, her face softening. ‘Your mum couldn’t abide dirt, could she?’

Sam carried on. ‘As soon as I saw that horse, I thought, I know what I’ll call you! He was a Yankee horse, shipped over from America to France, poor beast had no choice. See, by 1915 we’d run so short of our own horses, all dead or worn out, we had to buy up American horses. But they was a sorry sight, after months swilling about in a boat on the Atlantic. Shaggy coats, no shoes. Mustangs they called ’em, meant to be tough, and they never once disappointed us. Anyway we fed ’em up, clipped their manes, put shoes on ’em, and by the time I first saw him, my Yankee was such a beautiful sight! Light grey, black eyes, charcoal mane and tail. So being a Yankee Doodle Dandy and a grey, I couldn’t call him anything else but Dandy Grey Russet!’

‘That was a lovely name to give him, Sam, he sounds beautiful.’

Sam looked up, remembering she was there. She held her breath, hoping she hadn’t broken the spell, praying he would carry on.

‘Soon it was just Dandy. We learned the ropes together. At first I think I was on the floor more than I was on his back, but we soon got to know each other’s ways. I was driving a six-horse team, pulling a big old howitzer. We had three drivers on each team. I was the front rider on Dandy, farthest from the limber. All our team were Yankees, tough as you like. By the end of training, we weren’t six horses and three men, we were like one animal. We lived and breathed together and sometimes, when it was cold enough with the snow on the ground, we even slept together. We’d take our blankets down to the picket line and sleep with our horses for the warmth.’

‘Oh, did you ever get the socks?’ She bit her tongue, it sounded so pathetic, but for the first time Sam smiled.

‘Thanks, Nell, I got them, they fitted a treat.’

‘So, how was it you got into trouble for the horse?’

‘I got to love Dandy. He had a lovely nature – brave, clever, heart of gold. He always set the pace, always eager, would do anything you asked, go anywhere. He was special. We had to pull that gun over rocks and streams, through woods, up hills, and when it got bad, we pulled it through battlefields, bumping across dead and dying men, through sucking, stinking mud, always the mud. Dandy would fly through the shelling and I’d just about stay on his back.’

Sam threw his cigarette end on to the fire and immediately started to roll another. He inhaled deeply.

‘I remember, once, we came up to a shell hole too quickly and I thought we’d tumble in and have the gun roll on top of us, but I swear he turned into a Pegasus and flew! Where he went the other five followed, we was like some flying chariot. How the gun didn’t pull us back to earth, I don’t know, but it bounced behind us till we got to the line, with it still in one piece. And then came the day when we both got wounded. Do you remember, Nell, that day I was in the bath, you saw my scar?’

‘Do I remember? I couldn’t sleep for worrying how you got it, and you never did tell me.’

‘In the records, it says I was wounded by my horse falling on me. But it was nothing of the kind. Dandy saved my life that day. We’d just unhitched the gun when Jerry starts their bombardment, we fire back and the whole field explodes with shells. Dandy could take the noise, didn’t shy and bolt like some of them. But he was trembling. I speak in his ear and he stays with me solid as a rock. I’m looking for a way through the fire and smoke when all of a sudden Dandy’s pushing me back towards our guns, where I don’t want to go. “No, yer stupid beast,” I shouts at him, “not that way!”’ I’d just unhooked him, and normally he’d know it was time for us to get behind the lines till our guns needed to be moved on again. But he just wouldn’t budge and I got angry.’

Sam leaned forward, staring into the fire; he seemed to be following the battle in the flickering flames. ‘I could see a way out of Jerry’s firing range and I was damned well going that way. But Dandy keeps shoving me with his flanks and edging me back towards our guns, there was no way I could get him to turn. Suddenly his legs buckle and he falls ever so slowly on to his knees and then over on to his side, with me pinned underneath. That’s when I hears the whine. They say you don’t hear the whizz bang that kills you. Well, I heard this one, and it
would
have killed me if I’d carried on going the way I wanted. It landed just in front of us and Dandy got sliced with the shrapnel, down his left flank, and I got sliced down mine. But I tell you, Nell, that shell would’ve blown me to bits if I’d been up front, leading Dandy where I wanted him to go. I swear that horse knew what was coming, and he saved me.’