The Children's Book (100 page)

The letter came. It had a Red Cross and was addressed to “Basil and Katharina Wellwood” in the Quaker style. The Friends’ Ambulance Unit, it said, was greatly saddened to have to report that their friend Charles Wellwood was missing, and must be presumed dead. His courage had been exemplary. He had ventured into parts of the battlefield where many stretcher-bearers feared to go. He had brought in the wounded, English and German, had dressed their wounds and spoken to them with true gentleness. He had appeared indefatigable. He had been much respected, and would be much missed, by his fellow workers and by those whose lives he had saved.

“He is only missing,” said Katharina, in a thin, exhausted voice. “He may come back to us.”

“I don’t think the writer of that letter thought he would,” said Basil. He said

“We have the letter he gave us, to be opened, if—if he died.”

“But he may not be dead.”

“Do you want to leave the letter unopened?”

“No. No. I think it would be right to open it.”

They were afraid of opening it. It would not simply contain assurances that he had always loved them. That was not like Charles/Karl, who knew they knew he loved them. The letter contained a secret they might not want to know.

It was a week before they set out, in the Daimler, with an elderly chauffeur, for the cottage at the end of Dungeness. Basil had the idea that they should stop at Frank Mallett’s vicarage, and ask him what he thought of this Elsie. Katharina said this would be unfair, from which Basil inferred that she expected to think ill of the young woman. They did, in fact, drive through Puxty, but the vicar was not home, and Dobbin was away on war work on the land. So they drove on, into the only English desert.

On the outskirts of Lydd they were stopped by sentries as they passed the army camp. They could indeed hear the artillery, practising on the range amongst the shingle and blown bushes. This was a military zone, said the soldiers. They must state their business. They could hear the guns. It would be best to turn back.

Basil was by nature inclined not to reveal his business. He said he had private business with a lady in the cottage, along the Ness. His hauteur annoyed the soldier who said he would need a permit to drive in these parts, these days. Basil said he was visiting the schoolmistress, and the sentry said the army had taken over the school and the teachers had moved out of the zone.

Katharina showed them the letter.

“Our son is dead, this letter tells us. We have found the schoolmistress is his wife. We must see her.”

Katharina’s accent was more suspicious than Basil’s hauteur.

“How do we know you’re not spies? You sound German.”

“I am German. I have lived in England most of my life. I think I am English but that is no help. Please let us go through and look for this person. Our son is missing in Flanders. Presumed dead. It is bad, out there.”

The chauffeur said, in a Kentish voice,

“You can see where we go. You can keep an eye. You’ll see us come back. There’s nowhere to go you can’t see us, it’s all bare.”

So they drove on. Katharina imagined, not incorrectly, Charles/Karl on his bicycle, on the stony path. They came to the cottage.

A young woman was hanging out washing.

The chauffeur opened the door, and Katharina, in her veiled hat and driving-coat, stepped down.

“We are looking for a Miss Elsie Warren.”

“Well, you’ve found her,” said Elsie, finishing the pegging of a towel. Katharina’s voice trembled. She said “Can we go inside? Sit down? Please.”

“If you wish. Come in.”

Basil stepped out of the car, bowed and caped. Elsie gathered her basket of clothes under one arm, balancing it on a hip, and opened the door. They all went in. Elsie asked if they would like a cup of tea, and Katharina thought she could not sit, with the weight of her news, and endure the tea-making. She asked for water, and Elsie brought water for all of them.

“We have received,” Katharina said, “a letter. It tells us our son Charles is missing. It tells us we must think he is dead.” Elsie took a sip of water. She was rigid.

“We had a letter,” Katharina said, “from him. For—for this time. He asked us—to look for you.”

“It’s true,” Elsie said, in a thin, expressionless voice. “What he told you. We were married before he went out. The vicar could show you the register. You needn’t worry yourselves. I don’t want anything. I’ll not bother you.”

Katharina said “What he said. She is very independent. Taking care of her is hard, as I have found, myself.”

“That’s him,” said Elsie. One tear rolled down her cheek. She said “I lived here with Mrs. Oakeshott and Robin and Ann. Robin was killed in France. Like Mrs. Wellwood’s Robin. So Mrs. Oakeshott went to work in a hospital in Hove, when they closed the school. The military want to have this cottage—for their staff—but I need to stay here and mind Ann. Philip’s in Flanders—my brother. Charles came back once, on leave, some time after Robin was killed, and left us some money. I need to find work. Ann is almost a young woman. She’ll have to find work, too.”

“Ann?” said Katharina.

“Oh no. Don’t think that. Ann’s sixteen. Ann’s not—not your granddaughter.”

“So you were married before?” said Basil Wellwood.

“No. No I wasn’t. Ann was—a mistake. He didn’t tell you about Ann.”

“No. He didn’t.”

“Ann were the bridesmaid when we got married. He’s very fond of Ann.
Was
very fond of Ann.”

They sat there, and sipped water, in a fog of suspicion.

“It’s all right,” said Elsie. “You don’t have to bother about me and Ann.”

Katharina Wellwood surprised herself. “It isn’t only you and Ann. Is it?”

“I don’t know how you can see. It doesn’t hardly show.” Katharina said “It’s the way you hold your hands, on—You have no right to keep our grandchild from us.” Another tear rolled down Elsie’s face.

“You can’t take it from me. It’s all I got of him. You can’t do it.”

“Can’t do what?” said Basil, slower than his wife.

“Can’t take it and bring it up to be a snobby lady or a posh gentleman. Oh, please go away, I don’t know what to do.”

“You are very unjust,” said Katharina Wellwood, “to think so badly of us. Charles/Karl—asked us to look after
you
, which is what we want to do. It is
not good
for expecting mothers to work in armaments factories, and we—I was going to say, we cannot allow you to, but you must understand I know you are a free agent.

“What I want—more than anything—is to take you—and of course Ann—back to our house in the country. To make you comfortable. Karl said—wait—I will read it to you—‘She is a student teacher and I would have hoped, if I had lived, that she could study more widely and deeply.’ ”

Elsie began to cry in good earnest. Katharina said

“You know—Elsie, if I may call you Elsie—we
are
his parents. He is—he was—our son. Not so unlike each other. Please come with us.”

“You don’t understand. Your friends will despise me and laugh at you. I’m not in your class and shan’t ever be, no matter how you dress me up.”

“I have lost most of my friends because they despise me and sneer at me because I am a German. We can survive that. It is superficial and horrible. You are the woman my son married.”

Basil made a croaking sort of sound. He said “She’s right—um—
Elsie
—she’s right. It will make us very happy if you come with us. And we shall be—hurt, yes, hurt, if you won’t come.”

“It isn’t right.”

“Stop arguing,” said Basil. He liked her for arguing.

Ann came in, thin, little, leggy, with a face like a will o’ the wisp. She looked as though you could blow her away, or snap her like a twig. She smiled uncertainly.

“These are his—Charles/Karl’s—mum and dad. They’ve invited us to their house.”

Ann nodded seriously.

Katharina said “We can
try
, Elsie. And if you are unhappy, we will think of something else.”

The Belgian landscape is flat and watery, polders planted with corn and cabbage, claimed from the North Sea by a series of dykes. Further inland there are fields and houses resting on a thick bed of clay. There is water there too, water in ponds and moats, water running into little
bekes
(rivulets), water in canals. The land floods easily because the water cannot penetrate the clay and drain away. In 1914 the Belgians, having offered unexpected fierce resistance to the advancing Germans, had retreated towards the coast. The Belgians opened locks and sluices and flooded the land, letting in the North Sea, and creating impassable water plains between the Germans and the coast. The villages around the sandy ridges that offered height to an army had been battered by the guns into dust, which was worked into the clay, by churning wheels and hooves, by marching men and limping, hopping, crawling wounded. In the summer of 1917 General Haig commanded his armies to advance. In the early autumn, when the generals agreed to make a push against the Passchendaele ridge, it rained. The sky was thick with cloud, and no air reconnaissance was possible. The rain blew chill and horizontal across the flat fields and liquefied the mud, and deepened it, so that movement was only possible along duckboard planks—the “corduroy” road, laid across it. The men at the front crouched in holes in the ground and the holes were partly filled with water, which was bitterly cold, and deepening. The dead, or parts of the dead, decayed in and around the holes, and their smell was everywhere, often mingled with the smell of mustard gas, a gas which lay heavily in the uniforms of the soldiers, and was breathed in by nurses and doctors whose eyes, lungs and stomachs were damaged in turn, whose hair was dyed mustard yellow. The peaceful polders had become a foul, thick, sucking, churning clay, mixed with bones, blood and burst flesh.

Geraint and his gun crew were manoeuvring their gun on the corduroy road, between snapped and blackened tree stumps, over mud and pools of filthy water. He had had letters from unimaginable England. Imogen wrote that Pomona had announced her engagement to one of her patients, Captain Percy Armitage, who had lost both his legs and most of his sight in one eye. “She seems truly happy,” wrote Imogen. She had attached a photograph of her palely pretty daughter, from
which she had, with inconsiderate consideration, obviously cut away another child, with scissors.

Geraint didn’t much mind. He was thinking very slowly, in the racket of gunfire and shellfire, having had no sleep for twenty-four hours, and only two hours in the preceding night and day. Maybe because they were so tired the crew lost control of the mule that was hauling its end of the wheels on the boards. The gun keeled over in the mud. Geraint was under it, and was killed instantly, crushed into the slime. Nobody stopped to dig for him. There were orders not to stop for those who fell off the snaking boards.

As the landscape grew more and more to resemble the primal chaos, human ingenuity became more and more desperately orderly and inventive. Columns of bearers, at night, carried ammunition and water and hot food in insulated rucksacks to the men at the front. They resembled Christian, in
Pilgrim’s Progress
, making his way with his heavy pack through the Slough of Despond. One of the cyclist regiments balanced an odd load—full-size flat images of soldiers, painted in England by women who had once painted bone china, with realistic faces, with moustaches and glasses under their tin hats. These were puppets. They had flat strings snaking over the mud, operated by puppeteer soldiers hidden in foxholes and craters, who made them stretch and turn, stand up and fall. They made what were known as Chinese attacks, deployed in hundreds, under a smokescreen, inviting the Germans to fire on them and reveal their own positions. A man in a shell-hole could operate four or five of these “soldiers.”

The Women’s Hospital in the Claridge’s hotel in Paris had been closed in 1915: the women moved briefly to Wimereux and then back to London, where they opened a successful, much larger hospital in Endell Street. There were still ambulances and a field hospital, paid for by women’s colleges and run by crews of women. Dorothy and Griselda had elected to stay. Dorothy believed that if men’s wounds were dressed as well, and as promptly, as possible, there was a greater chance of their survival, and of the survival of damaged hands and feet, arms, legs and other parts. Griselda continued to talk to the wounded prisoners. One evening, when they were sitting in their shelter over a cup of cocoa—a thick taste and texture that recalled the quiet studies, the library and the rose garden of Newnham as surely as Proust’s madeleine recalled
his childhood at Cambrai—she said, casually, that this tent of prisoners were Bavarians from Prince Rupprecht’s Army Group. One of them, she said lightly to Dorothy, claimed to have seen Wolfgang Stern, alive, and as well as he could be, a month ago. Dorothy said “Do you ask all of them that question?” Griselda said “No, not all, of course not. Only the ones who might know.”