The Moon Field

‘Who’s that?’ George yelled at him over the din.

Haycock shrugged and turned round; walking backwards, he held out his arms to the girl and made a great show of tucking the flower into his buttonhole. He pulled a mock-woebegone face and then turned back to march on.

The band took a sharp left turn in the direction of the main road. A gap in the line of carts and motors opened for them and they joined the road and marched on towards the castle, a queue of traffic quickly forming behind them.

The castle was a huge medieval pile. Built of red sandstone, everything about it was square: the shape of the gatehouse, the lookout towers and the crenellations along the ramparts. The thickness of the walls was such that it almost seemed to have been hewn from solid rock. As they passed beneath the massive archway that led into a wide parade ground, all four young men felt a little over-awed; even Haycock’s swagger was less jaunty as he looked about him with curiosity. George thought about the soldiers who had passed through these barracks over centuries, all the feet that had drilled in this enormous, open square and marched out to do battle. He looked up at the corner towers and imagined the sentries posted there, scanning the surrounding countryside for the approach of opposing forces, preparing for a siege and determining to defend the fortress with their very lives. Wasn’t it something to be part of this history!

The band stopped playing and began to empty out their instruments. The soldiers directed the men towards the recruiting rooms on the other side of the square and the crowd began to disperse towards them. George nudged Turland to indicate to him the queue of men at an open doorway; in unspoken agreement, they all walked around the perimeter of the courtyard to reach it, suddenly shy of crossing the open space on the diagonal and drawing attention to themselves.

The men in their queue were of varied ages and occupations. Most wore the flat cap of the working man or carried their cap folded. Some had the rough-handed look of the labourer, with worsted jacket and heavy boots, whilst others had stiff collars, neat ties and an air of confidence about them.

The line of men moved along until they entered the hall. George could see that men were being called forward one by one to a row of desks, and old memories of school and the humiliation of being called in front of Mr Bevinson to explain himself returned for a moment, making him feel nervous. He moved back a little in the group so that Haycock would reach the front first.

When George’s turn came round, the corporal asked for his full name and occupation, and if he was willing to serve ‘for the duration’. He gave his details and said that he was willing. When he was asked his age, he said, ‘Eighteen years and three months.’

The corporal looked up sharply and said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that. Did you say nineteen?’

George looked puzzled.

The corporal asked him, ‘Do you want to join the war?’

George nodded uncomprehendingly.

‘So you need to be able to take up service overseas, should the opportunity arise,’ he said patiently.

George vaguely remembered the conversation of the previous night in the taproom. ‘Sorry, nineteen and three months,’ he said quickly and the man gave him a weak smile, took down his address, asked him for a signature and then told him to stand in another line to one side. As he left the desk, he heard Rooke step up behind him and declare, as confidently as you like, that he was Percy Rooke, an apprentice baker and that he was born in 1895.

Rooke came over, wearing a non-committal expression. George knew that he must be delighted to have passed the first hurdle and marvelled at his ability not to show it. Rooke seemed always able to blend into the background; he carefully avoided attracting attention and his knack of adopting a deadpan expression made him less visible than those with more animated faces.

‘Why did you say you were a baker?’ George asked wonderingly. Rooke’s capacity for duplicity made him a mystery to George.

Rooke tapped the side of his nose. ‘Scoffum,’ he said. ‘If I can get taken on in the cookhouse I’ll always have plenty of grub.’

George wished that he had thought of that and wondered whether admitting to being a postman had been a good idea. Perhaps he would be asked to take messages. He didn’t quite like the idea of scouting around alone along the front line; he hoped he could stay with all the others.

When they reached the front of the second queue, Haycock again went in before George. He emerged a few minutes later, straightening his jacket, and gave George a broad wink. Before George had time to ask him what had happened, the sergeant, a dapper man with a neat moustache, ushered him in. He closed the door behind him, saying, ‘Take your clothes off and step on to the scales, please.’ A doctor in a white coat was finishing making some notes on a form. George stripped. It was cold in the room. He placed his clothes in a little pile on top of his boots, as there seemed to be nowhere else to put them, and stood with his hands folded over his private parts. As he stood on the scales, he glanced down at his pale body and saw, to his consternation, that a huge area of dark bruising had come out on his left side. The sergeant raised his eyebrows but said nothing, simply noting his weight, and then quickly taking his height and chest measurements.

The doctor came over to examine him. ‘Well-built lad,’ he said over his shoulder to the sergeant and then asked the question that George had been dreading. ‘How did you get this bruising?’

George didn’t know what to say. He could hardly say that he had been set upon and robbed. He felt his cheeks stinging as he thought of his humiliation, how he hadn’t even fielded a blow, much less aimed one in return. ‘It was an accident, sir,’ he blurted out.

The doctor looked at him keenly, clearly recognising a lie.

George heard the sergeant mutter, ‘Fighting, more likely. These young men have no self-discipline.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ the doctor said mildly. ‘The recklessness of youth, though a nuisance in peacetime, can have its uses in wartime. Let the army sort him out.’ George, still smarting from being misrepresented as a roughneck, murmured a ‘Thank you, sir.’

The doctor told George to get dressed and then asked him to read some letters on a white board. George could read all bar the very last row. The doctor wrote something down on his form before asking George to show him his teeth; like a horse, George thought; then, more alarmingly: ‘I wonder if they can tell your age from your teeth?’ However, the form was duly signed and George was told that he could go. He left, feeling that the strict eye of the sergeant was still on him.

When Rooke and Turland had been through the same process, the four gathered once more.

‘I’m in,’ Rooke said, rubbing his sides. ‘I thought my ribs would bust, I took such a breath when my chest got measured.’

When a few others had joined them, they were taken into a room to swear the oath.

The adjutant who swore them in struck George as very fine. He had a strong physique and an upright bearing and his hair was cut very short and neat. His jacket was tightly fitted, and belt, boots and buttons were all polished to a high gloss. George was acutely conscious of the rip in his jacket pocket and the smear of soil on his rounded collar and longed to get out of his dirty clothes and become a proper soldier.

They stood in a row before the adjutant. He let his hand rest on a large, black Bible and stood to attention. He asked them to raise their right hand and swear to serve their King and country.

The room was very quiet afterwards. The officer let the silence linger to bring home to them the solemnity of the occasion and his eyes fell on each of them in turn, as if weighing up their character. George dared not glance around him but felt that every one of the group must feel as serious as he did. Then the adjutant relaxed his face and wished them luck. He gave them all a shilling and said that this was one day’s pay and meant that they were now deemed to be soldiers and subject to the King’s regulations. Rooke put his quickly in his pocket, as though afraid someone might realise they’d paid him three times his usual wage and take it away again. George thought that he would like to keep his as a kind of talisman but then remembered that he needed to give it to Mother.

The adjutant told them to come back on Monday morning and not to wait for their mobilisation papers because the paperwork wasn’t keeping up with the huge influx of recruits. ‘There’s a great need for men, and training must commence as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘We’ll be sending the next draft to camp on Monday so report here by eight thirty.’

They were ushered into a further room to be measured for their uniforms. Here, both men and women were working at sewing machines, treadles clattering as they sewed. Rolls of cloth stood on end, some neatly in line, some leaning at angles against the wall like a parade of tipsy soldiers. More bolts of cloth that looked like tent canvas were piled haphazardly together in a heap on the floor. George wished that he hadn’t had the thought that they were like soldiers.

One of the men got up from his machine. He had a tape measure draped around his neck. He took each man’s name and measurements and wrote them down; then he disappeared into a storeroom and returned with a pile of uniforms in a blue cloth and began to distribute them.

‘They’re the wrong colour,’ Rooke said under his breath.

‘What happened to the khaki?’ Haycock said with disappointment in his voice.

The machinist said, ‘There are too many recruits; we can’t get the supplies so we’re forced to requisition from the post office.’

‘Might as well stay as you are then, Farrell,’ Turland said cheerily.

George was relieved to be given trousers and a jacket, bundled together. Turland and Haycock only had trousers. He slipped the jacket on. It was a bit bigger than his post-office uniform and less tight across the back but the arms were a little short. He turned to find Rooke trying his and stifled his own complaint. Rooke was drowned in his jacket: the shoulders stood out well beyond his actual shoulders and the sleeves were inches too long.

The machinist tutted. ‘That’s the smallest we’ve got, I’m afraid, lad,’ he said to Rooke. ‘Get your mother to turn up the sleeves or they’ll be getting in your way.’ A woman whose needle had broken called him over and he went to attend to her machine.

Haycock said, ‘Well, it fits where it touches,’ and laughed.

Rooke scowled at him and took it off.

George took off his jacket and refolded it. They stood there, uncertain what to do next. The machinist, who had given the woman a new needle, turned and seemed surprised to see them still there.

‘That’s all,’ he said, looking amused and gesturing to a door at the far end of the room. ‘You’re free to go.’ He made a flapping movement at them with his arms and they trooped out feeling a little foolish.

In the parade ground, men were still queuing to enlist; others carrying bundles of uniform like their own were waiting around watching two horses being unharnessed from a cart and led away. The backboard of the cart was unfastened and its load of boots and shoes, of many different styles and clearly not army issue, was tipped out on to the paved ground. The quartermaster arrived and held each pair up in turn, shouting out the sizes. Men called out, ‘Me, sir! Here, sir!’ in return and he would toss each pair over, a scrum ensuing as men scrambled to get hold of them. Rooke, who took a small size for which there was no great competition, got a pair of boots fit for a farmer and said that they more than made up for the jacket, even though it was so big it stood still when he turned round. George decided that he would stick with his own boots. The legwork on his rounds had taught him the value of a pair of boots that were well ‘broken in’ and he had no desire to change.

Whilst the scrum was going on around the pile of boots, Turland waiting patiently and Haycock darting forward every now and then to make a grab, George noticed that a pair of fellows had detached themselves from the recruitment queue and were moving casually along the line to the edge of the square. Something in their manner made George immediately certain that they had changed their minds and sure enough they were making towards the gate. One of the men waiting in the queue spotted them and knocked the arm of his companion.

‘Oi!’ he shouted. ‘Where you off to?’

One of the men glanced back, and then carried on walking, his gaze fixed firmly on the ground.

A ripple of movement ran along the line as men turned in curiosity.

‘Enjoyed your march through town but had enough of the glory now, eh?’ shouted another man.

A mutter rose from the line. The man who was leading the way to the gate said something in reply that George couldn’t hear and he saw him stumble as someone shoved him. He recovered himself and for a moment squared up to his attacker, but then clearly thought better of it and stepped away from the line, beyond easy reach. There were boos and jeers from the crowd and shouts of ‘Cowards!’ and ‘Turncoats!’ The two men hurried away without looking back.

George felt his cheeks and neck burning as if he had been one of them. How horrible it would be to have everyone against you in that way. He almost hated the men for drawing down upon themselves the very thing that George dreaded most himself: that someone would see through him and realise that although he had been buoyed up by the glitter and the camaraderie, lurking close to the surface on which he floated was a current of dark, cold fear. Surely he wasn’t the only one to feel it. He looked around at the others; Turland was smiling, and Haycock laughing as Rooke hopped around absurdly trying to pull on the second of his new boots. He took a deep breath, thought of the feeling he had experienced as he stepped forward in the street and looked up at the blue sky. The moment passed.

Rooke tied the laces of his old boots together and slung them over his shoulder. They set off companionably towards the gate. Haycock said goodbye. He said he was going to drop in at the gas works to let them know not to expect him next week and then go on to visit a few friends and say cheero.

George walked back with the others to retrieve his bike from behind the basement railings. He didn’t relish the prospect of breaking the news of his enlistment to his family or the Ashwells. Nonetheless, now that he had overcome what he told himself was a fit of the ‘collywobbles’, he felt again the excitement of the great change that was to come. As he shook hands, first with Turland, who wished him a safe journey, and then Rooke, whom he joshed about his luck in squeaking into the army at all, he felt a little rebellious pride begin to grow, that he had instigated this and was being his own man. As he set off back towards the main road out of the town, the strains of the silver band reached him faintly once more and he found himself pedalling to the rhythm of imagined marching feet.

5

FRIAR’S CRAG

Feeling hot and dusty, George came through the gate into the yard, squeezed past the privy and the shed and propped his bike against the coal bunker. He took his new uniform out of the basket and tucked it under his arm. Lillie was sitting on the back step, surrounded by cooking pans. She was singing to herself and pouring water from one pan to another, using a broken-handled cup.

‘Hello, our Lillie,’ George said and squatted down opposite her. ‘What have we here? Is it a tea party?’

Lillie offered him the cup and he started to drink from it.

‘No, no,’ Lillie said crossly. ‘P’tend!’

George pretended to take a sip and said mmm. He was rewarded by a pat and a smile. Lillie’s ‘Fums Up’ doll lay on the ground with its painted lick of baby hair and rosy cheeks, looking up with a cheeky expression from the dandelions growing in the cracks in the brick path. George picked her up, put the cup between her hinged arms so that she held it and swivelled them up as if she were drinking. Lillie started to laugh. His mother’s voice came from inside saying, ‘What’s tickled you, Lillikins?’

George put his finger to his lips and passed the doll and the cup to Lillie. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘You feed Baby.’

He stepped round her and went into the scullery. His mother was in the kitchen beyond, standing at the table with her back to him, buttering the end of a loaf of bread. Her frowsy hair was pulled back into a plait; it hung down her back rather than being pinned in a coil in her usual manner. George noticed the dull grey hairs that were curlier than the brown and had escaped to form a soft edge to the silhouette of her head against the light from the window. Her apron strings were coming undone and the bars of her shoes were unbuttoned as if she’d slipped them on in haste. Such was George’s scrutiny as he hesitated to speak that, as if she had sensed it, she made a small sound of irritation and paused to slap at the back of her neck as though she felt a midge bite.

George steeled himself. ‘I’m back,’ he said.

His mother wheeled round. ‘Where have you been?’ Her face looked pinched; the two worry lines between her eyebrows that he knew so well were drawn tight. ‘You stayed out all night!’

George, unable to tell the truth without eliciting further questions that he didn’t want to answer, simply said, ‘I’ve joined up.’ He walked into the room and put his folded uniform down on the table.

‘Mind! Crumbs,’ she said automatically, moving it further over, away from the breadcrumbs and smudges of butter on the oilcloth. ‘What do you mean? Whatever did you want to do that for?’

‘I … I lost my wages. It was careless of me; I must have put them in my trouser pocket so they fell out when I was riding the bike. I know you always tell me to put them in my breast pocket. I’m sorry.’

‘Well, that was foolish, but never mind that, George. What do you mean you’ve joined up? Not enlisted?’ She looked again at the folded clothes on the table; then she reached out and touched the cloth as though trying to believe that it was real.

George said nothing.

‘It’s not right,’ she said. ‘We’ve taught you that since a baby.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘You know better than to get involved. Think how your father will feel about it; it’s not Christian!’

George shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well, I’ve done it,’ he said. ‘I’ve signed the papers.’ He reached into his pocket to look for the shilling.

‘But it’s dangerous!’ A plaintive note came into his mother’s voice. ‘Surely you’re too young … They won’t send you overseas, will they? How long have you signed up for?’

‘The duration.’

She sat down at the table and pushed away the breadboard, which chinked the butter dish and the muddle of plates together. ‘That’s good, better than signing up for years, that’s not so bad … it’ll be training,’ she said as if to herself. ‘It’ll all be over soon – before you’re old enough to go. Well, that’s something …’ She rested her forehead on her hand, her action belying her words of self-comfort. She looked as though she was about to cry.

George said, ‘Oh, don’t, Mother, please don’t.’ He touched her shoulder but she wouldn’t look at him. ‘I’m very sorry about the money.’ He produced the shilling, saying, ‘Here, I know we’ll still be short but I’ll get this every day so we’ll soon catch up again.’

He held it out to her but his mother just shook her head and looked away from him.

George was unsure what to do; he wished that his father were at home. Even if it meant facing his disappointment, it would be worth it to have him know what best to say to Mother.

‘Well, I suppose you must just look after it for me until I come back then.’ He put the shilling down on the table beside her elbow. He kissed the top of her head, picked up his uniform and went slowly upstairs.

It was stuffy in the bedroom with its sloping ceiling under the eaves. George changed out of his postman’s uniform and put on a clean shirt and trousers. The uniform would have to go back to Mr Ashwell but he didn’t feel that he could ask his mother to sew up the ripped pocket and he knew he would make a mess of it if he tried to do it himself. He put it on a clothes hanger, opened the window and hung it from the sash to air. He wished he had asked Mother for some of that bread.

Ted’s bed was unmade and still had the dent in the pillow where he had slept. George lay down on the smooth coverlet of his own bed, his head propped against the wooden headboard that his father had made for him when he was a child. He had been so proud to have this crude piece of carpentry from his father that he had scratched his initials in the corner. The marks were there still, though dulled by age and polish. It felt strange to look around the little room that was still so full of his childhood and know that he would be leaving it in just two days. All his things had been handed down to Ted so the shelves still held his old games: Ludo, Railway Race and Magnetic Fishing; his eye wandered over the boxes, their cardboard lids softened and dog-eared with use. Piles of Boys’ Best Story Papers and Funnybone comics, which he had reread time and time again, were stuffed higgledy-piggledy between a book on scouting and a pair of shin pads. George thought that he hadn’t taken Ted to play cricket for a long time and felt a pang of regret.

On top of the boxes was Ted’s newest acquisition, a ‘panorama’ of Captain Scott’s expedition. The little theatre had a scarlet proscenium arch decorated with gold acanthus leaves and inside was a snowy scene with tiny stand-up figures. In the foreground, Scott himself shouldered an ice pick while behind him fluttered the English flag, and men, horses and dog sleighs crossed the snow between the spread of tents and the mountains. He thought of the boldness of the expedition, how courageous it was to brave those unknown wastes. He thought of the aching cold, the labour of moving all the equipment and making camp, the fear of breaking ice. How arduous the enterprise and how glorious the attempt! He felt a shiver go through him at the romance of it all. Soon he would be starting out on an expedition of his own that was equally serious in intent, and which would demand just such manly qualities. He got up, retrieved his sketchbook from his jacket pocket and tucked it under his pillow. He closed his eyes and let all the strain, and the events of the last two days, drift into the background. He daydreamt of the time when he would return from the war. He would visit Violet, upright in his uniform, perhaps with stripes on his sleeve, and with his own tales to tell of distant countries …

Ted shook him by the shoulder to wake him to tell him that tea was ready. He groaned as the movement made his tender ribs ache. He could hear the clatter of plates and his mother’s voice telling Lillie to wash her hands at the tap.

‘Are you really going for a soldier?’ Ted said. ‘With a rifle and everything?’ He bounced down on the end of the bed.

George groaned again and said, ‘Te-ed.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Is Father home?’ he asked.

‘Not until around ten. I heard him tell Ma at lunchtime that he’s going on to choir practice after the meeting with the Elder. Where’s the rifle then? Go on, show us it.’

‘I haven’t got it yet and anyway it wouldn’t be safe to have it lying around in a bedroom,’ George said in an authoritative tone.

Ted, rather stung by what he saw as George acting ‘above himself’, said, ‘Huh, not much of a soldier then; you haven’t even got a proper uniform.’