The Children's Book

Griselda said “What do you think made them put it on? Does play-acting help them look it in the face? Or cut it down to size? It is gruesome.”

“We can’t afford to think about what is gruesome. You take a temporary bandage off a wound, and what is under it is gruesome and there is nothing you can do. They mostly know, not always. You know, Grisel, I am simply not the same person I was last year. She doesn’t exist.”

“I’m glad we are with the women. They are so intent on—on managing perfectly—that they just go on. Most of us, most of the time.”

“It’s early days,” said Dorothy.

52

Philip Warren was still in Purchase House. The gardener and the handyman had gone to the war, and there were weeds in the drive and the grass was wild in the orchard. Seraphita sat in semi-darkness, semiconscious, and waited for the day to end, coming briefly to life in the early evening, when safe sleep was on the horizon. Pomona had surprised both of them by going into Rye and volunteering to become a nurse. She was in a hospital in Hythe, changing dressings, emptying bedpans, smoothing sheets, which she did well. She turned out to be good at calming the dying, answering what they said, nonsense, rage, fear, calls for mothers, with a grave, gentle respect that was mostly helpful. She was good also with the bereaved, or about-to-be bereaved. She slipped dreamily around and yet made things temporarily clean and wholesome. She said to Philip, when she came home for a day, and lay, physically exhausted, in the orchard wilderness, that she felt useful, and needed, for the first time in her life.

“It’s unbelievably disgusting and when you can do it you feel—oh, I expect, like nuns used to feel, when they deliberately did horrible things. I’ve got good at knowing which muscles to lift things with.”

She hesitated.

“You know, Philip—this house—my funny family—they feel like a dream and I’ve woken up. No, they feel like two dreams—one full of beautiful things—pots and paintings and tapestries and embroideries, and flowers and apples in the orchard—you know—and one full of interminable boredom and waste, and—things that were not right but were all that happened—I know you know. I’ve stopped asking you to marry me. I’ve woken up.”

Philip thought that among her wounded men she might find someone to love her. Because she made his bed more comfortable, and cleaned his body.

It was not because of Pomona that Philip decided to volunteer for the army. He thought about it. He looked at his work, at his drawings, at his jars and vessels, shining quietly. He had, over time, found many of Benedict Fludd’s secret caches of receipts for glazes, in holes in the wall, interleaved in books, Palissy’s memoir, Ruskin’s Modern Painters. He had mixed them, tried them, varied them, adjusted them. It was long, and slow, work, it was patient and sometimes frustrating, but he was a man who knew something, a man with a craft, a man who had wanted something single- mindedly and had got it. There were not so many men in the world who could say that.

He was thirty-five. He was not an eager boy. He came from a class which was cautious. He knew there was a good chance of his dying, and the pots dying with him.

He went, he thought, because the world had become a world in which his work was no longer possible. This thing had to be shared and sorted out and finished. It was something he appeared to have no real choice about being part of. He did not—after all his reflections and searchings—really know why. That was how it was.

He went to see Elsie and Ann.

“I thought you would,” said Elsie, when he told her. “You might go and see Mrs. Fludd, now and then.”

“She doesn’t know who’s there and who isn’t. But I will.”

Philip’s medical was satisfactory. He went to training camp in Lydd, and in the autumn of 1915, went out to Belgium and the battlefield.

In the autumn of 1915 the two Robins were in trenches on what had become a static front line around the Ypres salient. Ypres was shattered; its houses burning, its ancient Cloth Hall in ruins. The grand attempts to advance on the enemy had given way to a life in dugouts and foxholes. Shells came over, woolly bears and black crumps made craters and changed the earth from minute to minute. Fighting was mostly raids on the enemy trenches, from which many men did not return. They crept and flitted across No Man’s Land, and were spotted by machine-guns and picked off. At night in No Man’s Land, stretcher-bearers, including Charles/Karl, looked for the living in the sweet stink of the dead, and stumbled amongst severed hands, legs, heads and bloody innards. The living often begged to be put out of their pain, and Charles/Karl for the first time considered killing, and once, as a head with no face screamed weakly at him, did shoot.

The Robins were nimble at raiding and had a good company commander whom they trusted. They sat in the door of the dugout and ate Maconochies, a mixture of tinned meat and vegetables. They scratched; they were infested with lice; everyone was infested with lice. There was a smell of old exploded shells, and a smell of death, and a smell of the unwashed, and a sweet smell of dispersed lethal gas, British gas which had floated back to its source when the wind changed. The Robins opened letters from home, from Marian Oakeshott, and Phyllis, and from Humphry, who sent gossip about Lloyd George and best wishes to Robin Oakeshott, if they were still together. Robin Oakeshott said casually

“He visited us a lot, in Puxty. He used to laugh and laugh with Mother.”

Robin Wellwood said “He’s a good man, in his way.” He added casually “Randy, though.”

“I think he was—that is, I think he is—my father,” said Robin Oakeshott.

“So do I.”

They considered each other, with mutual relief and embarrassment. Robin Wellwood went into the shelter, to fetch cigarettes. There was a singing howl, and a shell exploded in the trench. A splinter of it took off most of Robin Oakeshott’s head. Robin Wellwood took one look, and vomited. Men came running, stretcher-bearers, men with a blanket to cover up what they could, men with buckets and mops to cleanse the dugout. Robin Wellwood sat and shook. And shook.

He developed a permanent tremor down the right side of his face, in his neck, along his arm. His hand shook as he cleaned his gun. The commanding officer considered sending him back behind the line, to recover. Robin said tersely, in an unrecognisable voice, out of a constricted throat, that he was fine, thank you.

Two days later he stood up, in his new-fangled tin hat, which like most of the men he wore at odd angles, on the back of his head, like a halo. He was not the first, or the last, to be killed by the very skilful German sniper