From a Distance
Authors: Raffaella Barker
For Sam Banks, in loving memory
Contents
The HMS
Stanley Livingstone
sailed into Southampton harbour on a spring day in April 1946 to be greeted by sunshine and a flutter of smiling faces. It was a Sunday and on the quay the Salvation Army brass band was conducting a popular weekly service. Gleaming instruments reflected pomp and ceremony into the skies, trumpeting a welcome to the returning soldiers. Today’s congregation was restless and excitable. Troop ships had been arriving for months, docking at Southampton to disembark men, back in their thousands from the war. They were demobbed and sent on their way across the British Isles to their families, returning to life as civilians in a changed country. Peace was no longer news, and Southampton’s residents had lost the edge of jubilation that had fuelled earlier celebrations, previous homecomings. The end of the war had turned out to be a murky, fractured process, full of dashed expectations and uneasy silences. Once home, no soldier eased into the role of hero. Happy ever after remained a dream to chase.
Today, though, the soldiers on board the
Livingstone
were unaware of what lay ahead or that the band would have been there today anyway, the welcome a coincidence. Water glinted and slid beyond the churning docks, the breeze was unusually warm for April, and the congregation was a throng of Sunday morning citizens enjoying a spring day. Along the quay where the ship loomed like a cliff a small boy with a flag, his blue sailor coat buttoned to his chin, a scruffy dog at his heels, ran to and fro. A soldier at a porthole waved his red spotted handkerchief, and the child laughed and swung his little flag above his head. Higher, above the tiers of men lining the three decks of
Stanley Livingstone
and up on top of the gun tower, another flag danced and waved. The brass band began to play:
And did those feet in ancient times
Walk upon England’s mountains green
A girl walking past the band had stopped to listen. Smiling, she twirled on her heel, her head tilted back to stare up at the ship and her throat flashed. Her skirt fluttered up the curve of her thigh with another glimpse of pale flesh. The little boy ran up and put his hand in hers. A wolf whistle shrilled through the thrum of waves against the bow, and a cheer shivered across the decks. The brass band pumped out the tune, and over the roar of the engines came a ribbon of melody, the soldiers’ song plangent on the breeze.
Bring me my spear, Oh clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire.
On board, hats wheeled in the air, the verve of the hymn, the proximity of land, a tonic to the soldiers lining the decks. Pressing forward for their welcome, trying not to see the rubble and the broken windows, the dereliction beyond the harbour, silence fell. Facing a group of friendly people was out of kilter for them. Excitement coursed beneath filthy uniforms. No one spoke. They had been waiting to come home for months, gathered from outposts all the way from Burma back to Europe, stopping and starting as if on a never-ending bus journey.
Jokes were the shorthand for the future as the boat made its passage home:
‘Lucky we’re on rations, or we’d sink her,’ an officer, whip thin, his hands big like hams had observed, when the ship stopped in Ankara and another five hundred men embarked. Now, he leaned on the railings as the ship docked, and remarked to his second in command, ‘You could weigh the whole British Army against this old tank and we’d bounce against her like a rubber ball.’
A couple of artillerymen standing on the quarter deck, reread letters from home.
‘Bet your girl didn’t wait for you, mate,’ one nudged the other. ‘You should’ve sent those nylons when you had the chance.’
‘Nah,’ the other chewed gum, spat, and swaggered as he hitched his belt up a notch, ‘she’ll have me when she sees me, just you wait and see.’
The big ideas thrown about over card games had evaporated with the approach of land. Last night’s talk had been expansive: ‘I’ll take over a munitions factory and put it to building cars.’
‘I’ll bring some of those Arab horses home and breed them on a stud farm.’
‘Forget all that, mate. I’m for the quiet life, thinking of opening a little guest house by the sea and running it with the missis.’
Today they were quiet.
On the middle of the three decks, standing apart as was his habit, Lance Corporal Michael Marker of the Royal Norfolk Regiment absorbed the approach of his homeland and the prospect of post-war life with equal measures of excitement and apprehension. He’d been set to go to university to read English Literature and become a teacher. He looked around him today. At twenty-five, he was among the older men. Sometimes he felt that he inhabited a different skin from the Michael Marker he was in 1942 when he joined up in the spirit of bravado and excitement, encouraged by the swagger of his brother Johnnie, back on leave in a smart new uniform that made the girls jostle and giggle. Michael queued for his own uniform and army number with Ned Baxter and Charlie Denham, the boys he’d gone to school with, lads from his home village he’d shared his childhood with. He looked along the row of men beside him. New friends made on the journey home. Scriven, patting his pocket to check his tobacco tin was where he’d put it, was a nervy guy. He twitched now, pulled out a pair of dice and rolled them on his palm. Back to Birmingham he would go, and a job on a car production line. Michael wondered if he would ever see him again.
Ned Baxter had died in Normandy. Michael had been with him at Sourdeval. Saw him shot clean through the head and fall like a suit of clothes with no one in it. The bullethole was no bigger than the end of a pool cue. D-Day they called it. That was a joke. The next time he was home on leave, Michael had visited Baxter’s parents at the pub they owned. His dad, Eliot Baxter, had a wooden leg and a medal from Passchendaele, 1917. He’d taught Ned and Michael to tie flies for fishing when they were boys. Michael remembered the moment he stepped into the familiar darkness of the pub bar and Eliot Baxter looked up. For a fraction of a second, a wild fleck of hope had glinted like a spun sixpence in his eyes, extinguished the moment he remembered his son was dead.
Charlie Denham, red-haired and flame-fast on his feet with his pockets always full of things to trade, up for every spree and then some more, had joined the Northamptonshire because it was his mother’s county. He died after twelve months of fighting, drowned in the Rhine among the chaos and floating bodies.
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
Michael walked to the port side of the boat, and shaded his eyes to the glittering horizon. The deck was deserted. Every man on board was facing land, ready to dock and walk free.
England’s green and pleasant land
. Where was the green? Michael gazed across at Southampton. Buildings had collapsed in heaps, a wall lay like a wafer on top of a mound of rubble and in front of it a grey delivery van was buried up to the driver’s door, dirty and abandoned. Two busses were parked on what would have been the curb if it had not crumbled to brown sugar. A ringing sound became louder inside Michael’s head. He closed his eyes. Within, everything turned red.
Michael had seen tears haunt soldiers’ faces. He’d never seen an adult cry before the war. They dreamed and spoke of peace, but none of them really knew what it was or would be. Among the older men was a new anxiety, impossible to share in a few words over a cigarette. What now?
The ragged welcome at Southampton, small though it was, was overwhelming. Michael heard the liquid sound of faith swelling from the tuba, the trumpets and the clear voices of the civilian congregation and he felt unequal. Chain and anchor hissed as the winch spooled iron into the sea, and everything suddenly looked like newsreel footage, separate and ethereal. Service men waited, united for the last time. They inhaled the salt in the air and tasted expectation spiked with fear. Michael braced himself for another version of the unknown.
The
Stanley Livingstone
dropped anchor, its wake churning the busy harbour yellow while seagulls complained and wailed, their cries mingled with the brass melody on shore. Michael realised that in between the two extremes of his happiness and his fear, he felt nothing. Panic played a rhythm in his heart. He hissed an oath and returned to his place. He knew the price a soldier paid. On his last leave his father had sat down opposite him at the kitchen table and clasped both hands together. Michael was reading, but he closed his book. Johnnie said Dad had got serious with him one day; it had to be Michael’s turn now.
‘I never imagined my sons would go through this.’ He cleared his throat and his eyes flickered over Michael’s uniform, not meeting his gaze. ‘We thought we were fighting so this could never happen to you and Johnnie.’ Michael flinched. His father stood up, walked round the back of his chair and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Peace. It matters more than victory you know.’
Michael opened his mouth to say something back. He wanted to reassure his father, but he’d walked out of the room.
Disembarkation began. More of a crowd had gathered now, and people jostled, wanting to be first to meet someone off the ship. Who would not want to be waiting with open arms? Michael shrank back, alarm still locked in him from the smoke and guns, the mud and noise of war. Steadily the troops began to surge down the narrow walkways. Michael watched some shake hands, others embracing each other in a bear hug. Into the crowd they walked, and became invisible, a beat in the rush of escape. No longer an element of the huge grey mass of the boat, no longer a rank and an army number, the soldiers were home, desperate to become nothing more than ordinary people in a crowd. For a moment, Michael truly understood the war had finished. It couldn’t touch him.