The Book of Ebenezer le Page Page 19
He was lucky. A sickness they called the ’flu broke out at the Fort. It wasn’t ’flu really, but something worse. A fellow might get it one day and be dead the next. They buried twenty-six in the Military Cemetery at Fort George in a few days. It happened Raymond was at Fort Hommet doing his firing course when the ’flu was at its worst; and so as those who was there wouldn’t catch it, they was kept there. Raymond didn’t go back to Fort George until a few days before the Armistice; and so he didn’t finish his training after all.
He enjoyed his time at Fort Hommet. It was the nearest he ever got to living like a monk. He said Fort Hommet was so cut off from the world, it might well have been a monastery; except that it was built to defend the island against Napoleon. It was built out on the rocks and had a drawbridge and a moat; and Raymond liked to hear the rough sea beating against the walls outside his window, when he was lying in bed. He was N.C.O. in charge of a barrack-room and had a small corner room to himself. There was an officer supposed to be in charge, but he kept out of the way; and the sergeant had a habit of disappearing and not being seen for days. The fellows was fed like fighting cocks, but wasn’t allowed to tire themselves out by doing any work, in case they got bit by the bug. The only parades they had to go on was to line up twice a day and gargle permanganate. The rest of the day they passed lying on their beds yarning, or reading stories by Victoria Cross, or playing cards or housey-housey. Raymond passed his time in his little room reading Les Misérables in four volumes in French from beginning to end. Evenings nobody was supposed to go down the narrow neck of land that led to the road; but Alice and Allison Le Page, who was twins and third or fourth cousins of mine, kept a little shop along the Vazon Road and entertained soldiers from Fort Hommet in the room at the back every evening. They wasn’t whores, but they liked the boys. Raymond didn’t go and see my cousins; but often on my way home from work, I’d meet him going to Wallaballoo on his bike to have a good supper. Nobody at Fort Hommet got the ’flu.
Mr Dorey took me aside one day and told me I must expect my calling-up papers early in the New Year. He couldn’t hang on to me any longer. Most of the young Guernseymen was killed off and it was now the turn of us older ones to take their place. I didn’t care. The sovereigns was mounting up in the pied-du-cauche and my mother would be all right. She could employ an old man and a boy; and Tabitha would keep an eye on her. I began looking at my book of Army Instructions I learnt from when I was a sergeant in the Militia; but the Lee Enfield rifles was different now, and there was Lewis and Hotschiss machine-guns come along since. It didn’t seem my training as a soldier was going to be much use. One thing I decided I would do before I went: and that was go and see Phoebe. I wanted to see the kids, if nothing else. I had seen Eileen with her young husband in Town, and sometimes the older Sarchet and his wife; but never Phoebe.
I went one Saturday afternoon. I can’t say how I felt when I put my bike against the wall. A lot of mad thoughts was going through my head. I thought I’ll take Phoebe in my arms and say, ‘Come on, old girl, we both belonged to Jim, let’s be friends now; and if I come back from the War, I’ll be father to his children.’ Yes, I even thought I might marry her. I walked up the path and knocked on the front door. Phoebe opened it. She stood staring at me as if she was seeing a ghost; and then began to laugh. ‘He’s not in!’ she shrieked. ‘He’s not in! He’s not in!’ and burst into wild crying and slammed the door in my face.
The Armistice came on me without me knowing: the same as the War had done. I was clearing up inside one of the greenhouses down the Vineries when a chap rushed in and said ‘The War is over!’ and the sirens and whistles began going like billyo down St Sampson’s. The next minute every fellow was out of the Vineries and round the corner into Hutton’s pub, though Mr Dorey was temperance himself and didn’t like his men drinking. I had a couple and went home. When I got in Hetty was in the kitchen, laughing and crying. ‘Raymond won’t have to go!’ she was saying, all excited, ‘it’s too good to be true!’ My mother wasn’t excited. She was sitting quietly with her hands in her lap. ‘The end is not yet,’ she said.
I think the way the War ended broke my mother’s heart. She had expected something different. I don’t know quite what; but it wasn’t men sitting around a table signing a paper. I never really knew or understood all the funny ideas my mother had in her head. I do know she never had hope of anything much after Armistice Day. Perhaps I am more like my mother than I think; for I had my blackest thoughts that day.
It is easy to say years after the event that at eleven o’clock in the morning on the eleventh of November in the year nineteen hundred and eighteen I knew there was going to be another war; but I did. I was thinking about it all the afternoon while I was working in the garden. The only mistake I made was I didn’t think there was going to be as long as twenty years before it came. I was sure, anyway, the rejoicing was in vain. Nobody who was not alive at that time can imagine how senseless everybody was on Armistice Day. It wasn’t only relief from anxiety for those who was gone away; or because it was victory for our side. It was the end of the war that was going to end all wars. Never again! Never again! The Kingdom of Heaven was round the corner.
I went to Town in the evening because everybody else was going. I asked my mother to come with me, but she wouldn’t. Hetty and Prissy was there, arm-in-arm; and the two husbands together behind. There wasn’t room to move properly anywhere; and you just had to go with the crowd and was pushed. I talked to this one and that one in passing; and had a few drinks. The public houses was doing a roaring trade; but what they had left was only slops, and there was more on the floor than in the pint-pot. I saw Raymond with a crowd of fellows from the Fort; and he waved. He looked happy. I tried to look happy too; but I couldn’t keep it up. I squeezed my way down the Pollet, where I had left my bike in Grey’s cycle-shop at the bottom; and I had a last wet at the Red Lion on the way home. They was singing:
When the beer ... is on the table,
When the beer ... is on the table,
When the beer is on the table I’ll be there!
It was only half-past nine when I got indoors. My mother was just getting ready to go to bed, and left me to eat my supper by myself. I didn’t go to bed for hours. I sat by the fire thinking. I reckon I thought of everything had happened to me and to all the people I knew until then. I thought well, if that is what being alive in this world is, it don’t amount to much. A happy day and dreams of something coming; and then you wake up. A few pleasures you forget the minute they are over; and, for the rest, just go on and on and on like a donkey. That is what I am. A Guernsey donkey. Sometimes I stick my heels in and sometimes I kick out and sometimes I lift up my head to heaven and bray. I don’t know if there’s anything after, I’m sure. I do know if all the people on Guernsey go to heaven who think they’re going, there won’t half be some family rows up there. For myself, I’ve had enough of my relations down here. If I rise from the dead and know who I am, it’s Jim I want to meet again.
PART TWO
1
Raymond was among the first to be demobbed. He got a fortnight’s leave for Christmas, and then went back to the Fort for two or three days and was out. Most of the Guernsey boys at the Fort was out pretty soon; but those who was in France only trickled back in twos or threes over the months. Amos Duquemin, I remember, didn’t come back until the summer; but he was one of those who was with the Army of Occupation in Cologne. He said he had a good time and was made a fuss of by the Germans, who was as glad as he was the War was over. He liked the Germans better than he did the French; but, for all that, if he went down the back streets of a night, it was with three or four British Tommies, in case the Jerries wasn’t as friendly as they made out. He would have been surprised if he had known what was going to happen, and so would I, for that matter, even if I did know another war was coming. He lived through two occupations, and died only last year. The second time he was one of those occupied by the sons, perhaps, of those who he
had occupied twenty or, to be exact, twenty-one years before. It make you to think.
Raymond came to see me in civvies; but he hadn’t gone back to his sloppy clothes. He was in a bluey-grey suit made to measure that fitted him perfectly, and of very good material; and he wasn’t wearing a hat, and his hair was blowing in the wind. I hadn’t noticed before he had curly hair; but perhaps it only began to curl when he was in the Army. I said, ‘Well, how d’you like having to do some work for a change, instead of swinging the lead at Fort Hommet?’ He laughed. ‘I don’t do any work at the Greffe,’ he said. ‘I sit on a high stool and read the livres de perchage.’ ‘Goodness, what are those?’ I said. He said, ‘Didn’t you know that every douit and every hedge and every inch and square inch of land on Guernsey is weighed and measured, and has been for centuries?’ ‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘There is a flat patch at the top of the gully I don’t think belong to anybody. If I was to move my hedge back a few yards, I could save it from going to waste.’ ‘It belongs to somebody all right,’ he said, ‘probably to an old lady living in Torteval. There is only one way of getting hold of it.’ ‘How’s that?’ I said. ‘I’ll give you an instance,’ he said. ‘Monsieur Le Brun from the Hook Chook owns a field that is in the shape of a triangle. It isn’t big enough to swing a cat. Monsieur Le Blanc, his next-door neighbour, owns a field that is in the shape of a square, minus the small triangle in one corner. He asks Monsieur Le Brun to sell him the triangle; but, of course, Monsieur Le Brun won’t. Ah, but Monsieur Le Brun has a daughter, an only child; and Monsieur Le Blanc has a son, an eldest son. The eldest son is given a hint by his father as to what he must do; and he does it. By the next generation, the triangle has disappeared and the other field is square and belongs to the Le Blanc family in perpetuity.’ ‘I’d rather remain single,’ I said, ‘and go without the patch of ground.’ Well, I have remained single; but I might have done better if I had left that patch of ground alone. It have landed me into a lot of trouble, one way and another.
‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,’ said Raymond, ‘but not in Guernsey. In Guernsey land is worshipped first and money next and the Lord last, if at all.’ He was laughing, as if it was a great joke. ‘I’m going to be an odd sort of minister,’ he said. I said, ‘Are you really going to be a minister, Raymond?’ He said, ‘Of course I am going to be a minister. I can read the New Testament in Greek.’ I said, ‘Is that all you got to be able to do to be a minister?’ He said, ‘I will pass an exam in June and go to College in September; and when I come out I will have a certificate saying I can bury, marry, and give birth. As you said to me once, we’ll see.’
I thought he had something up his sleeve; but I didn’t know what. It was hard to believe this gay, good-looking young chap, laughing and making mock of the very religion he was going into, was the chétif little boy who used to follow the big Horace everywhere and couldn’t live without him. I wondered if he had a devil in him, the same as me; but, if so, it wasn’t an unclean spirit like mine. His was a clean spirit. I have never seen a cleaner-looking young chap. Nor was he preaching at me to make the Great Decision. He was being something in front of my eyes. He was bubbling over with something. When I remember him as he was those days, I think of what it say in the Bible: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’
I think it is true to say that Hetty died from love of Raymond; and, in a way, he killed her. He didn’t want that love. It was smothering him. She was never satisfied with anything he did. First, she wanted him to go into a bank; and he went into the Greffe. Once he was in the Greffe, she hoped he would rise to the top, and take Quertier Le Pelley’s place as Greffier some day; but instead he treated the whole thing as a joke. Now he was set on going into the Wesleyan Ministry; but when she said she would be able to go and live with him in England, he put her off. He would be sent on Circuit and didn’t expect to be more than two years in one place. It seemed she was going to lose him altogether. ‘Oh, I’ll be back in Guernsey for holidays to see you,’ he said, ‘as often as I can.’ At the back of his mind he was hoping she and Harold would be a comfort to each other once he was gone. He said to me, ‘A father and mother ought to mean more to each other than the children do. If they live only for the children, the children don’t get a chance to live themselves.’ He had a wise head on his young shoulders.
Hetty came round complaining to my mother. ‘I don’t know why us poor women got to bring children into the world for,’ she said. ‘They’re good while they are small; but when they grow up they are only a trouble and a disappointment.’ My mother didn’t say nothing about her two. ‘Mais ch’est comme chonna,’ was all she said. I know Tabitha and me was a disappointment to her, because neither of us was of the household of faith. It is true she would go as far as to say ‘La Tabby is not a bad girl.’ As for me, she knew I didn’t have a very good reputation. It goes without saying she heard from Prissy, or somebody else, of every girl I was supposed to have been with, even if I hadn’t. I let her think the worst. In Guernsey, it is just as well to be hung for a sheep as a lamb, since you are going to be hung in any case. She would listen to what people said, but all she’d say was, ‘Ebenezer is a good son to me.’ She didn’t talk in the house about me getting married; but when the time came I picked up with Liza again, she said, ‘Now that’s a girl will never make a man a good wife.’
I mustn’t give the idea Raymond was bad to his father and mother when he came out of the Army. If anything, he was more patient than before. He said to me, ‘I’m the one who is the father and the mother in this house. They are just two unhappy children.’ He didn’t help his father in the yard; but he got him boys’ adventure stories from the Library. I remember Harold reading Coral Island and Peter the Whaler forwards and backwards; and he said they was good yarns. For himself, Raymond was reading a book I looked into, but couldn’t make head or tail of. It was called The Unrealised Logic of Religion, I don’t know by who. There was another book he had I read bits of called The Beloved Captain by Donald Hankey; but that book he had bought for his own, because he liked it so much. I liked the bits I read of it, myself. That Captain must have been a nice chap.
Hetty had bought Raymond a piano from Fuzzey’s in High Street for him to practise on. She chose it on the advice of Mr Pescott and it was quite a good one. I know it fetched over a hundred pounds at the sale. Harold and Hetty didn’t think much of Raymond’s playing. They said, after all the money they had spent for him to learn, he couldn’t play a piece with a tune in it. That wasn’t true. He used to play ‘The Death of Nelson’ for his father, and ‘Home Sweet Home’ with Variations for his mother; and then he would play a piece by Beethoven for me. It wasn’t I was above liking pieces with tunes. I thought there was tunes in those too; though with lots of twiddly bits. The one I liked best was the slow middle part of a sonata Raymond said was called The Pathetic. I thought he played that well; but when I told him so, he said, ‘I will never really be any good; except as an accompanyist.’
It was after the War that Prissy began to get younger and younger. Her skirts got shorter and shorter and her blouses lower and lower and her hair frizzier and frizzier; and she painted and powdered her face, and wore hats La Hetty said she wouldn’t be seen dead in. She laughed at the idea of Raymond being a minister. ‘He will never make a minister, that one,’ she said. ‘All he think about is enjoying himself.’ When the spring came he joined the Old Intermedian’s Tennis Club at Elm Grove, and learnt to play tennis. Prissy would be watching from her upstairs window and see him go off on his bike in his white flannel trousers and open-neck shirt carrying a tennis racket. ‘Why, he don’t even go to Chapel!’ she said. He did go to Chapel Sunday evenings, and sometimes in the morning; but she would see him in the afternoons with a towel round his neck going to L’Ancresse for a swim. He had given up teaching in the Sunday School when he was in the Army, so as he could be at home with his friends from the Fort.
They had been demobbed and gone back
to England; but two or three came over in civvies for a holiday at different times that summer and stayed at Wallaballoo. The one I remember was Clive Holyoak, and I also heard a lot about him from Archie Mauger. If Raymond was the most popular N.C.O. in the Battalion, Clive Holyoak was certainly the most famous Private. When he came over for a holiday, Raymond invited me to go down to Wallaballoo and hear him play his violin, though I had already heard him once at a concert when he was in khaki. He was only a little chap and had silky golden hair and a face, I thought, like a sulky girl. In civvies he was smartly dressed in a loose woolly suit and didn’t look too bad; but, as a soldier he was hopeless. Raymond used to let him fall out for most of his P.T., or otherwise he’d faint; and Archie Mauger said that in Ceremonial Drill, when he sprung to attention to present arms, his puttees fell down on his boots.
Archie was in the barrack-room when our Clive arrived with his draft from England. While the other fellows was getting unpacked and laying out their kit for inspection he, if you please, was sitting on his bed with his legs crossed like an Indian snake-charmer, playing his violin. Sergeant Strudwick happened to be crossing the barrack square. I used to see the one-time Sergeant Strudwick the years after the War peddling his barrow of fruit and vegetables from door to door. He was the toughest, ugliest, wickedest-looking scoundrel I have ever seen; except for old Steve Picquet, who lived after the Second World War in a bunker at Pleinmont called Onmeown and died a few years ago. As might be expected, Raymond liked Sergeant Strudwick and said he had a heart of gold. Archie Mauger said he was the best blasphemer in the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry and, he was willing to bet, in any regiment of the whole of the British Army. He had been Bandmaster of the Manchesters in peace-time and now played a one-stringed banjo he had made himself. When he heard Clive playing his violin, he stopped dead in the middle of the square as if he was struck by lightning, raised his fists to heaven and, in words I dare not write down, called on God the Father Almighty and His bastard Son, Jesus Christ, and Mary, the mother thereof who, according to Sergeant Strudwick, was anything but a virgin, to come down and listen to this! Then he was across the square and up the steps and along the verandah and into the barrack-room like a lion let loose.