one morning, as they sat in the fresh air under an unfurling chestnut tree in Regent’s Park to recover from an unusually bad night, Jinny told Nancy about the grey coaches.
Tacked on to the end of some of the hospital trains from France were locked carriages with blanked-out windows. The doors were never unlocked while the regular wounded were being unloaded, but plain grey vans discreetly waited until the rest of the train was empty. The ordinary ambulance drivers did not ask questions and no one speculated about the men who must be inside the coaches. There was no cheering for them.
Nancy listened to this account in silence.
This time in the Uncanny she did not see anything clearly and that was a mercy, but she could hear all too well. There was darkness barred with slats of light, a terrible weeping, and a husky voice that tonelessly whispered, ‘All gone,’ over and over. And there was a low growling, sounding less like a man than an animal, a wounded bear or some other creature she did not even know.
Jinny saw her face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she cried. ‘It’s your other sight, isn’t it? I didn’t mean to wake it up, Nance.’
Nancy had never told another soul, but she had described to Jinny how as a girl she had glimpsed the war long before it had begun.
She breathed deeply. ‘It’s all right. We’re both all right, aren’t we? It’s the soldiers. They’re dying, not us.’
Worse than dying, some of them, she now understood.
Cornelius was out there, and her cousins Rowland and Edwin. Arthur was still too young to enlist but he was already at Sandhurst on an accelerated officer-training programme. Even Arthur would soon be going to France.
Jinny clasped her hand until the voices faded. Sunshine sparkled on the grass as they walked to a café to buy a bun for breakfast before catching the bus to Lennox & Ringland.
It was at the beginning of 1915 that Cornelius had suddenly decided he must join up in the ranks.
Devil was too old to fight in France, but he believed in doing his duty. He devised a series of shows for the Palmyra that featured comedy routines, patriotic songs and choruses, and uplifting speeches from popular public figures. They were called ‘Union Jack Nights’, and seats were given away to men in uniform. On one of these nights, Cornelius was sitting in a front fauteuil. Devil had asked him to watch the performance and give him some ideas for improving the static sets. A soloist came out to the apron to perform a song about joining up. The chorus went, ‘I do like you, cockie, now you’ve got yer khaki on.’ The women sitting in the seats near Cornelius sang and clapped and the singer marched down from the stage. Passing through the audience she stopped in front of Cornelius and handed him a white feather.
The next morning he went out to the recruitment office. He didn’t tell Devil and Eliza about his intentions, and even Nancy only heard about it afterwards. He was examined by a medical officer and – to his intense humiliation – immediately classified as medically unfit.
A different man might have accepted this judgement and looked for useful war work at home, but the normal rules could not be made to fit Cornelius. As always, only his personal logic applied. Once he had decided it was what he must do, he could not contemplate not going to France. He loved motor vehicles and driving with a passion that had begun with Devil’s De Dion-Bouton, and he concluded that if he was not to be a soldier he must be an ambulance driver.
He volunteered, and within days he was on the Western Front.
The field dressing stations were canvas shelters crammed with wounded and dying men. Cornelius and the other drivers collected the injured from the dressing stations and ferried them behind the lines, through the mud and chaos of the nearby battle, to the clearing hospital. The hopeless cases were set aside, and there were more than enough of those, but men with even the smallest chance of survival were roughly patched up and transferred to slow, crowded casualty trains.
Thus two people who Nancy dearly loved had formed the first and final links in this long rescue chain, and she was proud of them both.
At last the war to end all wars came to an end.
After the armistice Cornelius finally came home. Arthur also survived, although he remained in France with his regiment. Edwin and Rowland Shaw were among the many thousands of men who did not come back. The landscape of the Uncanny was thronged with lost and dead men, but if her cousins and others she had known were amongst them Nancy did not distinguish them. It was like being a mechanical conduit for images that were distressing but not connected to her, and for this she was deeply grateful.
Recalled to the present by a nudge from Jinny, Nancy collected herself. ‘What were we saying?’
Jinny said gently, ‘How’s your brother?’
‘Not bad, thank you. Some days better than others.’
Some days for Cornelius were very bad.
‘Is there any more tea in that pot?’
Nancy sloshed thick brown brew into their cups.
‘Why don’t you come out with us tonight, Nance? Me and Joycey and some of the others are going to have our tea at Willby’s and then quite likely a half-pint at the Eagle.’
Nancy liked poached eggs on thick slices of buttered toast, and the pleasant heat in the neighbouring saloon bar afterwards when Jinny’s friends crowded round a beer-ringed table to argue about communism or rights for women. The war had changed the group’s political objectives, as it had changed everything else, because women had the vote now – or some of them did.
‘There’s still a lot of work to be done,’ they agreed.
For the last two years the group had been all female, but just recently one or two soldier boyfriends had reappeared. The men perched suspiciously on the edge of the circle and their presence changed the whole atmosphere.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t tonight. Ma’s expecting me home.’
‘Fair enough. Better get back to it, I suppose.’
‘See you tomorrow.’
Miss Dent was at her typewriter. The keys clacked like hailstones on cobbles and the carriage return pinged every few seconds.
Mr Lennox strolled out of his office.
‘Find me the Platt correspondence file, Miss Wix, please.’
She knelt at the lowest drawer of a tin filing cabinet and extracted the folder. His shoes looked as though someone polished them every morning and she wondered whose job this might be. Most certainly Mr Lennox did not shine his own shoes. There weren’t many domestic servants these days, but perhaps his wife did it for him.
It was twenty to six. Miss Dent collected Mr Lennox’s signature on a handful of urgent letters. ‘Shall I take those down to the post?’ Nancy asked.
Five minutes later she had completed her errand and was free to make her way home. Although it was an easy bus journey to Islington from the printworks in an alley behind Fleet Street, Nancy usually preferred to walk. She told herself she was saving the fare and she needed the exercise, but the truth was that she was in no hurry to get back home.
Pulling
