I Sidcup, Kent · Saturday, 19 October 1918
The rain had stopped somewhere east of Lewisham, and by the time the train drew into Sidcup the sky had cleared to a hard, rinsed blue that made the wet roofs shine. Lieutenant John James Cadden of the Anzac Provost Corps stepped down on to the platform with his greatcoat over his arm and stood for a moment, as he had learned to stand in France, letting the place come to him.
A small station. A footbridge. Beyond the railings, a road climbing between hedges towards a cluster of chimneys and the square tower of a church. A porter with one arm was sweeping leaves into a heap and watching him sidelong. Everything was very quiet. That was what Jack could never get used to in England: the quiet. In France there was always a gun somewhere, even when there was not; you heard it in the soles of your feet. Here there was a blackbird on the fence, and the slow drip of water from the eaves, and that was all.
He coughed into his fist, and the cough went on longer than he liked. It had been with him since Boulogne, a dry, catching thing in the bottom of his chest, and twice on the boat he had felt the deck tilt in a way that had nothing to do with the sea. He had told himself it was the crossing. He had been very ill once before, in Egypt, in the winter of ’16 — pneumonia and pleurisy, a fortnight with the sister’s hand on his forehead and his own breath sounding like a saw in wet timber — and he knew the shape of that country. He had no wish to go back to it.
Seven days’ leave. He had meant to spend it in London, at a hotel in the Strand where nobody would want anything of him, and to sleep. Instead he had a letter in his breast pocket, three weeks old and much creased, in a hand he did not know.
Dear Cousin Jack, it said. You will not remember me, we met only the once, at Grandmother’s at Glen Innes when I was five years old and you knocked me off the verandah. I am at the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, for my face, and have been this long while. Mother writes that you are in the Provost and an officer now. I would take it kindly if you would come and see me, if you are ever on leave. There are things here I cannot put in a letter. Your affectionate cousin, Fred. (Cpl. F. T. Poole, 3rd Bn, A.I.F.)
Jack did remember. A hot afternoon; the smell of his grandmother’s roses; a small fair boy in a sailor collar who would not stop following him; a shove that had been meant as a joke. The boy had cut his chin on the step and bled, very brightly, and not cried at all. That had impressed Jack more than anything else about the visit. He had been eight, and his family had been back east from the Kimberley for a few months, while his father tried his hand at keeping a hotel.
He asked the one-armed porter for the hospital.
“Up the hill, sir, and through the gates by the lodge. Frognal, they used to call it. You’ll know it by the benches.” The man paused, leaning on his broom. “You’ll be one of the Australians’ officers. About the business with Medway?”
Jack looked at him. “What business is that?”
“Ah.” The porter’s face closed like a door. “Nothing, sir. You’ll hear it up at the hospital, I expect.” And he went back to his leaves.
He knew it by the benches, as the porter had said.
They stood at intervals along the road and on the green below the church and outside the public house at the corner, ordinary wooden benches of the kind you found in every English village, except that someone had painted every one of them a bright, uncompromising blue. On two of them men were sitting. They wore the same blue — hospital blue, the soft suits and red ties of the convalescent — and as Jack came up the road the nearer man turned his head, and Jack saw what the blue was for.
He had seen worse. He had seen everything there was to see, at the crossroads and the dressing stations and once, for three days that he did not let himself think about, in a sunken lane near Pozières. But that had been in France, where such things belonged. This was an English village on a Saturday morning with a blackbird singing, and the man on the bench had no lower jaw that Jack could see, only a long tube of living flesh, like a sausage of skin, running from his chest up to where his mouth should have been. The man watched him with perfectly ordinary grey eyes, and Jack understood that he was waiting to see whether the officer would look away.
Jack did not look away. He touched his cap. The man raised two fingers from his knee in reply, and Jack walked on up the hill with the blood thudding in his ears, and understood the benches. They were a kindness, and a warning. They told the village: here is where they may sit. You have been told. Do not stare.
II The Queen’s Hospital, Frognal
The hospital had been a great house once, and it still had the bones of one: a long, pale front, tall windows, a sweep of lawn going down to trees. But the lawns were crowded now with low wooden huts, joined by covered walks, and the smell that came out of the doorways was carbolic and ether and boiled cabbage, the smell of every hospital Jack had ever known.
A sister met him in the hall — a tall, tired woman with a cap like a ship in full sail — and when he gave his name her face changed.
“Cadden. You’re the cousin. Thank God.” She drew him aside, out of the stream of orderlies. “I’m Sister Ashworth. Corporal Poole is in Hut Nine. He’s confined to the ward. He has been since Thursday.”
“Confined? What has he done?”
“He went out on a pass on Wednesday evening, to the village, and he didn’t come back until half past six on Thursday morning. That would be a matter for his own officer, and a reprimand, and there an end of it. Our boys do overstay; they’re men, after all, and the village is kind to them, mostly. But on Thursday morning a man called Medway was found dead at the bottom of the railway cutting below the Lamorbey bridge. He’d been there all night. And Corporal Poole will not say where he was.”
Jack felt the old stillness come down over him, the one he had learned at the crossroads. “Who was Medway?”
“A local man. Harold Medway. He was in the Buffs; he came home in 1916 with shell-shock and has been — difficult — ever since. He had words with some of our boys in the Black Horse a week or so ago. He called them names. He said things about their faces.” She hesitated. “Corporal Poole was one of the men he said them to.”
“And the police?”
“Inspector Dacre from Bexley has been up twice. He has been perfectly civil. He has also asked our commandant for a list of every man who was out of the hospital on Wednesday night.” She looked at Jack very straight. “There were four. Three came back by ten o’clock and can account for every minute. The fourth is your cousin.”
Fred Poole was sitting on the end of his bed by the window in Hut Nine, with a book open on his knee that he was not reading. He stood up when Jack came in, and saluted, and then — seeing who it was — let his hand fall and stood looking at him with his head a little on one side, the way a bird looks, because he had only the one eye to see with.
The left side of his face had been rebuilt. That was the only word for it. Someone had taken skin from somewhere else on his body and laid it over the place where the eye and the cheekbone had been, and shaped it and stitched it and let it heal, and then come back and done it again, and again. The result was smooth and shiny and slightly too pink, like a doll’s face, and the eyelid on that side was closed and sunken and would not open. The right side of his face was a young man’s face, fair and freckled and very like his mother’s, which Jack had last seen in a photograph on his own mother’s mantelpiece in Victoria Park. The two halves did not quite agree with each other. It was as if two people were looking out of him.
“Fred,” said Jack, and held out his hand. “I’m sorry I knocked you off the verandah.”
For a moment nothing happened. Then the right side of Fred’s face broke into a grin, lopsided and enormous, and he took the hand and wrung it.
“Strewth,” he said. “You remember. Mother said you would. She said the Caddens never forgot a thing in their lives, they only told it different.”
III Hut Nine
They talked first of family, because that was easier. Fred’s mother, Aunt Frances, was at Annandale now, in Young Street; she wrote every week, long letters about the brothers and sisters, of whom there seemed to be a great many. Jack’s own father had gone to the war at fifty-four, swearing he was forty-eight, and had been sent home from the tunnelling depot with sciatica after half a year and was furious about it still. Jack’s brother Will was a staff sergeant in the sanitary sections, in France. Their cousin Charlie, Uncle Frank’s boy, had sailed that June with the reinforcements.
“The whole tribe,” said Fred. “Grandfather would have liked it. He was at Eureka, you know. Or he said he was.”
“He said he was at most things.”
“He was at Mount Wheeler, though. Your dad and Uncle Will found the nuggets. That’s true. Mother has the cutting.” Fred turned the book over in his hands. “I was at Anzac from May. Then Malta, with the flu. Then back for the end of it, the evacuation. Then France.” He touched the left side of his face, quite lightly, the way a man touches a sore tooth with his tongue. “Pozières. Twenty-seventh of July. A sniper, they think. I don’t remember it. I remember the twenty-sixth, and then I remember a hospital ship. They said the eye was destroyed. That’s what it says on the form. Destroyed. As if it were a bridge.”
Jack said nothing. He had been at Pozières too, a few hundred yards away, in the same week. He had been directing walking wounded down a road that had stopped being a road, and he thought it was quite possible that he had passed his cousin on a stretcher and not known.
“Fred,” he said at last. “Where were you on Wednesday night?”
The bird-like turn of the head again. The one blue eye considered him.
“That’s what you’ve come for, then. Sister Ashworth wrote to you.”
“Nobody wrote to me. I came because you asked me, in a letter that took three weeks to find me at a crossroads outside Péronne. I didn’t know about any of this until a railway porter with one arm asked me about the business with Medway.” Jack leaned forward. “But I’m here now. And I’m a policeman, Fred, whatever else I am. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me.”
Fred looked out of the window, down the long wet slope of the lawn to the trees.
“I can’t,” he said. “I gave my word.”
“To whom?”
“To a dead man,” said Fred Poole, and would say nothing more.
IV The Lamorbey cutting
The railway cutting ran deep through chalk and clay below the village, with a brick bridge carrying the Lamorbey road across it at the narrowest point. Inspector Dacre met Jack there in the late afternoon. He was a heavy, quiet man in a bowler hat, with a moustache going grey and very shrewd small eyes, and he shook hands without any sign of resenting the Army’s interest.
“I’ve a boy in the Navy myself,” he said. “I don’t want to hang one of your lads, Lieutenant, if he didn’t do it. But a man is dead, and that’s my business.”
He showed Jack the place. There was nothing to see now but a long scar in the wet grass of the embankment where a body had slid, and a darker patch on the ballast at the bottom. Medway had come off the bridge, Dacre said; the parapet was low there, barely to a man’s hip. He had broken his neck in the fall. The first down train on Thursday had found him at ten past five, the driver seeing something in his lamp and stopping just short.
“Fell, jumped or was pushed,” said Dacre. “That’s the whole of it, isn’t it? The coroner will want to know which. He’d been drinking at the Black Horse till closing — sitting alone, the landlord says, quiet as a lamb, which was unusual. He left at ten. Nobody saw him after that.” He paused. “Except, I think, your cousin.”
“Why do you think that?”
Dacre put his hand in his pocket and brought out a small paper packet, and unfolded it. Inside was a strip of gauze, perhaps four inches long, stiff and brown with something that might have been blood or might have been iodine.
“Found on the parapet,” he said. “Caught on the brickwork, on the up side. It’s surgical dressing. The hospital uses it on their faces. Half the boys up there have a bit of it about them somewhere.” He folded it up again. “I don’t say it proves anything. But a man who was here, and won’t say he was here — that troubles me, Lieutenant. You’re a policeman. It would trouble you.”
It did trouble Jack. He stood on the bridge after Dacre had gone, with his hands on the cold wet parapet, looking down at the line where it curved away towards London between its banks of dead bracken, and he coughed until his eyes watered, and he thought about the crossroads.
He did not often let himself think about the crossroads.
It had been in the spring, during the German push, at a junction outside Hazebrouck with a ruined estaminet on one corner and a dead horse on another. His job had been traffic: to stand there through the night with a hooded lamp and a whistle and two military policemen, and keep the roads moving — guns up, ambulances down, ammunition up, wounded down, the whole bloodstream of an army squeezing through one stone knot in the dark. And at two in the morning a battery commander had come up the road with his limbers and demanded the right of way, and Jack, because there were six ambulances coming the other way with the gas cases, had held him.
Four minutes. That was all. Four minutes at the side of the road while the ambulances went through. And in the fourth minute the German gunners, who had been searching that junction all night, found it.
He had been obeying orders. He had been doing exactly what he was there to do. The court of inquiry had said so, and the battery commander, who had lived, had shaken his hand afterwards and said so too. But Jack still woke some nights with the lamp in his hand and the whistle in his mouth, and heard the horses, and knew that whatever the inquiry said, there were men who would have been alive if he had waved them through.
That was what policing was, in the end, he thought. Not catching anyone. Choosing who went first, and living with it.
V Sunday, 20 October
He went to see Mrs Medway in the morning.
She lived in one of a row of brick cottages behind the church, a small, upright woman of about sixty in a black dress that had been let out at the seams and taken in again. The front room was very clean and very cold, and on the mantelpiece, between two china dogs, there was a photograph of a young man in the uniform of the Buffs, smiling, with his cap pushed back.
She did not seem surprised to see an officer. She seemed past being surprised by anything.
“You’ve come about the Australian boy,” she said, before he could begin. “The one with the face. Corporal Poole.”
“Do you know him, Mrs Medway?”
She sat down rather suddenly in the chair by the empty grate, and folded her hands, and looked at them.
“He came here,” she said. “On Wednesday night. Near midnight. He knocked on that door, and when I opened it I thought — God forgive me — I thought it was the devil come for me, with that face, in the dark. And then he spoke, and he had a nice voice, a gentle voice, and he said, ‘Mrs Medway, I’m very sorry, but it’s Harry. I think you’d better come.’”
Jack sat very still.
“He’d been walking back up from the Black Horse,” she said, “and he’d seen my Harry on the bridge. On the parapet. Standing on it, in the dark. And he’d gone and talked to him. He told me after. He said Harry swore at him something terrible at first, about his face, the way he did in the pub, and your cousin just stood there and let him, and then he started to talk to him. About France. About Pozières, where Harry was too, in the Buffs, on the other side of the road. And Harry came down. He came down off the parapet and sat on the ground with his back against the bricks, and cried. And your cousin sat with him. Two hours, he said, they sat there.”
She stopped. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked between the china dogs.
“And then Harry said he was cold, and would the corporal fetch his mother. He said he wanted his mam. Like a little boy. So your cousin came here, running, with his bandage come loose, and I put on my coat and we went down the hill together as fast as I could go.” She looked up at Jack, and her face did not change at all. “And when we got there, he was gone. There was only the bridge. And we looked over.”
“Mrs Medway — ”
“He made me promise,” she said. “Your cousin. No. That’s wrong. I made him promise. I made him swear on his mother’s life he would never tell a living soul that Harry had been up on that wall. Because if the coroner says he did it himself, Lieutenant, then he’s a suicide, and they’ll not bury him in the churchyard with his father, and the pension stops, and everybody in this village will know my boy took his own life because he couldn’t bear what was in his head. And I will not have that. I will not.” Her hands were shaking now. “Let them think he fell. He was drinking; he fell. That’s what I told the Inspector. I never said the Australian had been here at all. I didn’t think — I never thought they’d think — ”
“That he pushed him.”
“He was kind to my Harry,” said Mrs Medway. “He was the only one who was, at the end. And I’ve let them think he’s a murderer, to save my boy’s name.” She put her face in her hands. “And he’s kept his word. Hasn’t he? He’s kept it.”
“Yes,” said Jack. “He’s kept it.”
VI The inquest
There was a great deal he could have done, and in the end he did very little, which was the hardest thing.
He went back to Inspector Dacre that afternoon and told him that he had established, to his own satisfaction as an officer of the Provost Corps, that Corporal Poole had spent the hours after closing time on Wednesday night sitting with a man in distress, and had then gone to fetch help, and that when he came back the man was no longer there. He said that the gauze on the parapet was very likely Poole’s, and that it had come off while he was helping a drunk and frightened man down from a dangerous place. He said that the man’s mother could confirm the time at which the corporal had knocked on her door, and that by the time the corporal returned to the bridge with her, Medway was already gone.
He did not say what Medway had been doing on the parapet. Dacre, who was not a fool, looked at him for a long moment with his small, shrewd eyes, and did not ask.
“Climbed up there drunk,” Dacre said slowly, “and was helped down by a soldier, and the soldier went for his mother, and while he was gone the poor devil tried to get back up for a better look at the line, and slipped. That would be my reading of it, Lieutenant. If Mrs Medway agrees with it.”
“I think she would.”
“And the corporal will say as much at the inquest?”
“The corporal will say exactly what he saw, Inspector. He went for help. When he came back, the man was gone.”
“Which is true,” said Dacre.
“Which is true.”
The coroner sat on the Wednesday, in the long room above the Black Horse, and found that Harold Medway, late of the Buffs, had died of a broken neck consequent upon an accidental fall from the Lamorbey bridge while under the influence of drink. He added a few words about the dangers of the low parapet, which the parish council had been asked to raise these three years, and a few more about the gallantry of a wounded soldier from the hospital who had tried to help. Corporal Poole, who gave his evidence in a quiet voice with his head turned slightly to one side, was not named in the newspaper report.
Harold Medway was buried in the churchyard on the Friday, beside his father. Fred Poole was given leave to attend, and stood at the back in his hospital blue with Jack beside him, and afterwards Mrs Medway came down the path and took his hand in both of hers, and held it for a long time, and said nothing at all.
The hospital reprimanded him for overstaying his pass. It went on his record. He seemed, if anything, rather proud of it.
VII Wandsworth · 30 October 1918
Jack did not get back to France.
The cough that had come with him from Boulogne went down into his chest on the night of the inquest, and by the Saturday he could not climb the stairs of the hotel in the Strand without stopping on every landing. On the Sunday a doctor was sent for. On the Monday they took him to the 3rd London General at Wandsworth, which had been a school for soldiers’ orphans before the war and was now a hospital full of soldiers, and put him in a long ward full of men coughing the same cough.
Influenza, they said. Then pneumonia. He had been here before; he knew the country. This time he could tell, by the way the sister’s face moved when she thought he was asleep, that it was a different road.
Fred came on the Wednesday. He had wangled a day pass from Sidcup on the grounds that his cousin was dying, which was true, and he came up the ward in his hospital blue with his cap in his hand, and the men in the other beds, who were mostly too ill to care about anything, turned their heads to look at his face, and then looked away. Fred did not seem to mind. He sat down on the chair beside Jack’s bed and took out a paper bag of grapes, which he must have queued an hour for, and put it on the locker, and looked at his cousin with his one blue eye.
“You look bloody awful,” he said.
“Thank you.” It came out as a whisper. Jack’s chest felt as though someone were sitting on it. “How is Mrs Medway?”
“She’s all right. She’s knitting me a muffler. Blue.” Fred grinned his lopsided grin. “Everything in that village is blue. I think they’d paint the church blue if they could get the paint.”
Jack tried to laugh, and coughed instead, for a long time, and when it was over Fred was holding a basin, quite matter-of-factly, as if he had done it many times, which no doubt he had.
“Fred,” Jack said, when he could. “The crossroads. I never told you about the crossroads.”
“You told me on Wednesday night. At the Black Horse. After the inquest. You were a bit drunk.”
“Was I?”
“You held a battery for four minutes to let the ambulances through. And the Hun found the junction.” Fred put the basin down. “You know what I think? I think there were men in those ambulances. Gassed men. And I reckon every one of them got where he was going, because of you. Nobody counts those ones, Jack. They don’t put them in the inquiry. But they’re there.”
Jack looked at the ceiling. It was a very high ceiling, with a crack running across it like a river on a map, and he followed the crack for a long time with his eyes.
“That’s what you did on the bridge,” he said at last. “Isn’t it. You let a man go first.”
Fred did not answer. After a while he reached out and took his cousin’s hand, the way Mrs Medway had taken his, and held it. Outside, beyond the tall windows, the afternoon was going down over London in long bars of gold and grey, and somewhere a long way off, over the roofs, a church clock was striking four.
John James Cadden, Lieutenant, Anzac Provost Corps, died at the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth, on the thirty-first of October 1918, twelve days before the Armistice. He was twenty-nine. He was buried with full military honours at Brookwood, and among the effects that went home to his father in Perth were a pipe, a tobacco pouch, an officer’s tunic and a small sealed envelope containing nine coins and a Masonic badge.
Corporal Frederick Thornley Poole was discharged from the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, on the twenty-seventh of February 1919, and sailed for Australia in March. He grew vegetables at Engadine, south of Sydney, for many years, and died in 1970. Among his things, his family remembered, there was a muffler of blue wool, much darned, that he would never let anyone throw away.
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