Damage Read online

  Copyright © 2014 D.G. Holliday

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  On a hurried leave toward the end of October I made directly for Somerset and the old vicarage where Aunt Louisa, her letter had wryly forewarned, might now have become a shameless invalid, one limb and another lately going insubordinate. My jangle on the iron bell got a sing-song cry from within and had her tugging open the door, effusive as ever. A stay of the one brief night she would not have; confirmation of great-nephew David’s appointment to the curacy of a High Church parish in Berkshire had rejoiced the heart and eased the bones. So she laid out a leisurely tea in the conservatory, adjusted the bamboo chairs and the damask cushions, and we enjoyed the warmth of the mellow autumn sun. She enthused on the place of ceremony, the nature of ritual, and I was able to assure her that in three years of Army chaplaincy I had found my Broad Church principles to be robustly serviceable, alongside the disciplines and observances of assorted colleagues; and in supporting the men, officer and ranker, whose only discipline might be the drills, the rules and regulations, of the Army itself. We admired the greens and yellows of the hardy shrubs glowing beyond the panes of glass. Her reflection was a burnished pink; for a moment I saw the hale and lively aunt of my childhood.

  ‘Ritual always has meaning, Philip. From the earliest times. Always meaning.’

  My smile was overmuch courtesy and too little conviction.

  ‘Smiling won’t do.’ But she smiled herself. ‘Ritual puts a large matter into a lesser space. You were taught so, at college. Symbols. A symbol is a great thing written small, for human sense and inspiration. Look at your Ypres. All of Belgium is there, in that little corner of the country.’

  Across the lawn Robert from the village had straightened up at his scything, a final mow before the threat of frost, one supposed, and was wiping the blade. Not a necessary action perhaps, rather a symbol of sorts, to show the thorough workman; or, by his faint wince, a relieving of the back. A symbol may lie merely in the eye of the beholder. Not Ypres though. Ypres looms starkly in the eyes of the world. A Belgian doctor had said, as our dressing-station came under shell-fire, ‘To die here at Ypres, Mr Glover, I will accept that, for the history books.’

  The grass was thick and lush this year, yes, the silage for Robert’s old mare would last into the spring and save many a sack of oats. In former days the vicarage had been a manse, with ground enough to rear a big family. Even so the remaining half-acre yielded generously, Robert doing wonders in the vegetable plots each turn of the calendar page and the dozen beehives ensuring pollination of the pear-blossom in April, the apple in May. The rows of jars in the pantry glistered, the honey many-hued, from palest lemon through apricot to rich amber – ‘You were always a boy for colours’ – extracted with utmost patience by fearless Mr Drage, who at eighty laboured on and now had finished the double quilting of the hives against the cold months. He knew cider and perry too, and cordials and wines, and chafed to see fruits here and there on the boughs not fallen, oblivious of their purpose in this world. Bees were otherwise, never minding the removal of the last of the honeycombs at Michaelmas, later if the season continued benign, and accepting the sugar-syrup as their nourishment without quibble.

  ‘Your father used to do most of the work, you know. Then the new church was built, all soulless brick fetched in by the railway, when the village spread the other side of the station. So he retired to Wiltshire, to Malmesbury, and his studies.’ There had been a little money, from an old bequest; and some from the Church; and also from our mother’s passing. That had been a difficult time for my brother, Cyril. I had appeared and his mother was gone. ‘Such a brave boy! You are two fine boys, Philip. Elderly aunts need their dear nephews.’ Somerset too was dear, and time-honoured, its countryside and its towns, and glorious Wells; and Exeter in Devon, and Gloucester, cathedral cities all three and she had shown us around them in our long summer holidays.

  ‘We played cricket when we came to see you, with the village lads. One of their uncles was foreman at the iron mines, over in the Brendon Hills. He took us there. A tunnel into the hillside, sloping upward so as to drain the water out, they said. Giant men – trucks rumbling! Dark and sinister, to a ten-year-old.’

  ‘You were imaginative boys, growing up. You loved the hills. Coleridge and Wordsworth you were, for a while.’

  How could one not aspire to be a poet, gazing out from Wills Neck and Bagborough Hill, out from the Quantocks across the Vale of Taunton? Yet we wrote nothing. Cyril said that a young man having about him a book of verses is as beloved of the Muses as the poet himself. So we read The Ancient Mariner and walked to Nether Stowey and wondered at the press of boats in Watchet Harbour. But why, says Cyril, did Coleridge speak of a kirk, as the mariner came home to his own country, and not a church? And how could Shelley say that poets are the world’s unacknowledged legislators? Poets – Cyril soon declared – are men permitted to be silly without fear of incarceration. He was going off to law school and plain truths and realities. Youth may be footloose and have its term of wildness, its French Revolution – ‘Bliss to be alive!’ – but soon must come Ode to Duty. Radicals for a year or two, Wordsworth and Coleridge both, and then steady as yeoman or burgher a lifetime. As for poet-legislators, I had yet to discover Solon the Athenian and when I did so Cyril had passed beyond the reach of ancient exemplars.

  ‘You retained the poet’s mind, Philip. You said that the albatross was an image of the profound sacredness of life. Its death was a rupture in the universal order, to be healed by the mariner’s suffering. Cyril was right for the Law. You were right for the Church.’

  ‘Father used to say, “If you can do nothing virtuous each single day then do something interesting.” I think we do, Aunt, in our modest way. Cyril will be no barrister or judge and I no bishop!’

  ‘There never was a stuffed shirt in the family, Philip, that I recall.’

  The weather holding dry next morning, though overcast, and my visit being duly spun out, I asserted the claim of a man of two-and-thirty to a spell of honest exercise, and joined Robert and his grandsons at their lifting of the last patch of potatoes. The crop was for Robert’s household and an old neighbour; Miss Louisa was partial to a carrot or parsnip, or even a bit of swede, but potatoes were food for men and lads. They showed me, Tom and Albert, their collection of stones and pieces of rock, round and flat and no shape at all, white and grey and pink and brown. Some of them had been got in the Mendip Hills and Cheddar Gorge, on a trip the school once did; most were from nearby rutted lanes and out of the stream.

  ‘We’ve otters back now,’ said Tom. ‘We took photos, for the class.’

  ‘And what will that do for the trout?’ said Robert. ‘It’s all sp
ort for their brains, with their books. But you can’t eat pebbles on a winter’s night. Tom says Cheddar is called carboniferous. I say it’s cheese. King Edward is the old king that’s gone, to most. In this house, it’s these fat pink tubers.’ He put a few of them into a bag along with the carrots. His daughter Vicky would persuade Miss Louisa to have a slice or two with Sunday’s belly pork and apple sauce, when she called over to do the chores.

  ‘A look at our boys says we know how to eat, I tell the good lady. Not that their mother would have them grow up too soon, sir. You understand.’

  *

  Emerging from the station at Paddington I quickly gained Edgware Road and was swept down into Oxford Street by a brisk north-westerly that cleared the skies and gave brilliance to the London thoroughfares. It was a pleasure to stride out and pass before shop after shop, windows intact, doors and lintels in place, storeys rising one above another. All was straight and regular, undisturbed, albeit the solemnly shuffling queues were perhaps longer than when I cabbed through earlier in the year. That had been a strange and a difficult commission, and yet successful, as Corporal Whetton returned to his unit in company of myself and his sergeant without charge. This man’s hardships – wife and children very sick, an image still sharp – I had believed real and severe. The removal of doubt was a satisfaction, to chaplain and sergeant alike.

  I reached Bloomsbury and sat awhile in Bedford Square, and I strolled beneath the fluttering remnants of foliage on the lofty planes, richly tinted, emulating the trunks’ mottled bark; the broad leaves gave the majestic tree its name, platanos, as the broad shoulders of Aristocles are said to have earned him the epithet Plato. It was a scene for rumination. The quiet streets exuded contentment, even wisdom. The steps of the British Museum rising to the massive pillars in the Ionic order compelled a pause, as long ago I had paused at the foot of the Parthenon, aglow with Athens warmth and English ardour. A young officer on a dull evening entertained the mess with a nice conceit, that the British Isles are to north-west Europe what Greece has been to the south-east: we have our Tempest and Gulliver and Crusoe, they have Odysseus and Jason; ocean peoples both, he said, stout men of the high seas. It was a bold image, to be held aloft and borne through into the Grecian chambers.

  ‘The Arthur Evans discoveries on Crete, sir? At the Ashmolean, the majority of them, Oxford.’

  They were, of course, the Minoan artefacts – the doctors had told me there might be an occasional lapse of memory, after the wounding. Fellow student Johnson had gone there, to Oxford, abandoning theology for classical history. Would he now be able to say, stood here before me and I recalling his face and manner, who the Minoans were? They were not Myceneans, not Homer’s “long-haired Achaeans”. Traders, yes, perhaps early Phoenicians, merchant relations of the Hebrews? Or Egyptians – a noble family exiled by some sneering Shelleyan Pharaoh, with their kin and servants and beasts, and pots and bowls, in ships, flat-bottomed for the Nile but on the open seas hazardous; ships that would become over the generations large and deep-keeled, and numerous, the grandest of fleets. Doubtless there was philosophy too, aided by their perfecting the grape and the olive; wine to free the faculties and oil to lighten the darkness. Sadly their script was elemental and left no discourse to shape for us their fancies and reasonings, no Plato…

  It was a fine bust, as the attendant said. So were they all. Yet I had the displays largely to myself as I wandered the rooms in the deepening quiet. What matters the past, under the crushing weight of the present? And quietness? There are sorts and classes of quietness: the cease of gunfire, escape from a crowded mess-hut into still air, the moments that follow the last word of divine service. Quietness that is too pure becomes silence. The utter silence of stone – of graded plinth and fluted column, of limb forever poised, mantle forever furled – becomes oppressive. As I went out through the great doors, a man and a woman were gazing up at the pediment, at the statuary, and attempting to read the inscription. I caught a Flemish word or two – refugees, of middling age, well attired though soberly. My nod was returned and I spoke out the words for them: ‘Man emerging from savagery through the influence of Religion.’ They thanked me and passed inside.

  High Holborn, as I marched along its broad pavements, was bathed in the aroma of rich tobacco, and I saw my brother, Cyril, with his briar pipe and his round face, and his wife, Henrietta, and their three daughters. Again they had been missed, my young nieces and old Malmesbury. The next leave must be longer; no man is indispensable, the hospital will continue its work. On Ludgate Hill the locomotives hissed over the viaduct, pulling hard, not carriages and people but wagons and goods. I turned aside into a public house and requested a barley wine of the young woman behind the pumps.

  ‘There you are, Captain. Padres are all captains, sir, my sister says.’

  ‘We don’t use the rank. It’s honorary.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’ She was forward of manner, in the innocent way some women have of holding on to their childhood.

  ‘I suppose it means that we’re unarmed. We don’t fight.’ Was there once a man I defended – stood over him on the ground – and the German lowered the bayonet and faded into the mist?

  My kit-bag had grown heavy; I eased it to the floor while sandwiches were called up from the back. The establishment was busy enough and had its share of khaki. I was content to stay at the bar until a seat should come free. Two plates appeared, the smaller with a slice of cake.

  ‘What d’you think, sir? I’m deciding I might go.’

  Her words carried no sense of obligation, which indeed they should not. I was glad of the thick bread to munch on; there was no ready answer.

  ‘A nurse, I mean. I’m not sure I could do it. They say the country girls are better. Animals, you know. My sister Sarah’s gone to the land work. She says there’s less to eat out there than here in London. Unless you like boiled dandelions.’

  ‘There’s a need,’ I said.

  ‘I see the lads come in here. Leg gone. It’s not much, is it, serving ale. Mostly to old gents.’

  ‘The old gents are looking after wives and daughters, children…’

  She nodded agreeably, a cheerful woman. Stepping smiling into a hospital ward, her work for the men would be already half done. I told her so, and to have no fear, as she made room for me by a corner with a brisk hand. The fireplace was empty, but I took warmth in a second barley and enjoyed the hubbub.

  ‘It was easy talking to you, sir,’ she said as I returned plates and glass to the counter. ‘The soldier customers just want a laugh and a song. Can’t stand here and blame them.’

  By indulgence and sloth I had let slip the service at St Paul’s, and must be satisfied with a turn about the place. The tremendous size of this most elegant of English churches makes one forget almost that the former cathedral was even larger, the greatest of Gothic edifices, the spire taller than Ulm’s, Cologne’s. Now all we have left of that medieval wonder are a few stones, lying before the south portal where the word RESURGAM holds in a mere eight characters an immensity of hope, strength and virtue. Within all is timeless. There is no heed nor care for the alarums and vagaries of the hour. And all things here are familiar, if not to be called friends, which might be vainglorious, then respected acquaintances. The figure of Dean John Donne was the only piece of statuary to survive the Great Fire undamaged. Nearby are masonry fragments from the Temple of Jerusalem, as is said. The beautiful Light of the World is an act of devotion by the painter equal to any of the labours and pieties of us churchmen; equal and beyond.

  Twilight had fallen quickly and hushed the streets as clouds crept in low and turbid; there would be no Gotha bombers over London tonight. The omnibus I hailed and boarded in Cheapside was dimly but welcomingly lit. I sat behind the driver and I marvelled at the competence as his bony head jerked and his sinewed neck twisted, and the throbbing machine was urged forward into the gloom at a pace to gratify a traveller now weary of walking and ready for the comfort of the boo
ked hotel. At the desk I signed the register and was handed a telegram. It was from Aunt Louisa. Great-nephew David had thrown up his curacy and enlisted as a private soldier in the Royal Berkshires. I collected the key and an evening paper and climbed the stairs to my allotted room.

  *

  A dearth of shipping at Folkestone had brought movements to a near standstill that induced, as I wandered the quays, a sense of limbo. After the browns and greens of Kent’s farmlands had come the abrupt whiteness of the cliffs and a tightening of nerves as embarkation loomed; and then the blankness of a wide, pale sky and a sea void and sombre. And so one reflects on the use made of this short release from duty. Each visit back to England, since the first in the winter of 1914/15, had become more valued, I saw. The necessity was learned of presenting to the mind fresh images – faces, objects, events – that should force out, as if the head were a pot or canister, something of what had been witnessed over the weeks and months of ministering. And these harbour sights now, are they to be embraced or held off? The toilworn merchantman at the dockside putting ashore its human freight is a tableau of homecoming. Tall men that wave, hunched men that anticipate unbroken rest, they have awaiting them kin and friends and the joy of the commonplace; even the lonely man will sit on a bench in his town’s park and read a book. A seaport is a no-man’s-land of the spirit, neither dire war nor blessed peace. Those of us headed outward must draw virtue from our thoughts.

  The day lengthened and on a whim – the spectacle perhaps of gulls squabbling over scraps of fish – I chose to stay the night with the St John’s unit across the town, where the company was always amiable and the conversation had the felicity of lightness and weight in equal measure. A pair of Canadian orderlies had called in from the nearby Shorncliffe camp; they entertained us with reminiscences of their Scottish childhoods. After supper a new arrival at the Brigade, old enough to serve by only a small margin yet already returned from Arras, was voluble in the matter of body and limb. He had been at a factory in the North where damage was inflicted by hammer or chisel, by cog or belt, and not by the hand of man.