The Somme Stations

subscription whereas the rest of us would just pick up the copies we saw lying about. I read, ‘York Officer’s Big Pike’. It seemed to me that the paper was starting to lay off the actual fighting, ever since the battle of Loos, the month before, which had been the first to involve the New Armies, the Kitchener boys I mean, sorts like us.

Word was, it had been a calamity. We’d used poison gas shells which meant the brass was getting desperate and that the war reports would no longer be able to call this a ‘perfidious German method of warfare’.

To my right sat Scholes, who’d been silent since Hull. In his gloved hand, he held a sheaf of papers with music on them. He could read music just like words. You’d see him singing to himself as he did it. The week before, he and a shunter from Leeds who played the piano had given a concert in the reading room at Alexandra Dock, and I’d gone along just in case nobody else did. I was quite done in, so it had put me to sleep, but in a pleasant sort of way.

Bernie Dawson was sitting over opposite, alongside Oliver Butler. He’d been fishing about in his pack for a while, and now produced a canteen and a metal cup. He poured himself a tea, and drank it down fast; he poured another and offered it first to me. I took a swig, and Roy Butler most unexpectedly spoke up again.

‘Owt like?’ he said, meaning he wanted a belt of it for himself.

I handed him the cup and he downed it in a gulp.

The clouds in this place were like nothing I’d seen – like great black arrows swooping in from the sea. Presently, Roy Butler remembered about the cup, and passed it back to Dawson with a nod.

‘Anytime, mate,’ said Dawson, restoring the cup to his pack. He sat back in the bouncing wagonette, and pulled his blanket more tightly around him. ‘Talk about a hole,’ he said, taking in the strange beauty all around. Roy Butler was lighting a cigarette. He smoked more than his twin brother, I believed, and even though he usually appeared equally nerveless, he was more inclined to do so at anxious moments, so I had perhaps got him worried with my questions about our Spurn duty. I credited him with being brighter than his brother, and I fancied that, if kept apart from him for long enough, he would eventually become normal.

‘All these fields,’ Dawson said to Oliver Butler, ‘… could be just the place for some field telephones. You might be mucking in with the RE boys, Ollie.’

‘We’ll be digging their bloody latrines,’ said Butler. ‘You just wait.’

‘Here,’ said Dawson, ‘where are we billeted?’

‘At a farm, according to Oamer,’ I said.

Suddenly leaning forward, Dawson enquired, ‘At a farmhouse, I hope he said.’

Well, the place was Cobble Farm. Quinn was in the farmhouse, the rest of us in the barn. For the first two weeks I never saw the farmer, name of Lowther, but sometimes at five in the morning I would hear the roar of a great petrol-driven tractor. The grub was served out to us from the back door of the farmhouse by Mrs Lowther, who was friendly enough, but wouldn’t have the rank and file in her house. There were no animals to be seen, only half a dozen cats, and the whole place was clarted with wet mud – shone with it when there was any light in the sky, which there was for about three hours a day.

On the first morning, Quinn paraded us in the farmyard; then he started in on a little speech, with many a hesitation, and a glance towards the wide farmyard gate and the dead straight mud road stretching away to the beacon, burning even then at eleven o’clock on a rainy Tuesday morning like an advertisement for hell. Our time in the Alexandra Dock, Quinn said, had made soldiers of us. We may not realise it, but he could see that we were very different men. The work we were about to commence was of vital importance, but he hoped we would also enjoy and learn from it. It would be hard work, and he’d warned Mrs Lowther that it would put an edge on our appetites. (At this he grinned at us all, which meant he had told a joke.) He gave another glance over to the gate, and the smile gradually disappeared. I knew what was coming:

‘Unfortunately…’ said Captain Quinn, in his sad, dreamy sort of way.

He was gazing towards the mud road, and this time we all sneaked a look in that direction, for a motor van had appeared on the horizon. At this Quinn’s smile, and power of speech, returned. With the van coming on quickly, he was talking about how the work in prospect would afford considerable scope for the display of initiative. ‘… And I am pleased to say’, he continued, as an orderly climbed out of the van to open farm gates, ‘that the shovels do now seem to have arrived.’

We would be constructing defensive earthworks in a vast field lying between Kilnsea and the beginning of the Spurn peninsula. The plans were in a piece of paper held in Captain Quinn’s leather-gloved hands, but the paper and the field would prove to be two different matters.

The trouble (Oliver Butler had been dead right) was that for all our training, none of us could dig properly except for Roy-boy and Andy-lad.

I recall the end of our second week in that slimy field…

Fusilier Scholes – perhaps blown down by the roaring wind, or perhaps having simply missed his footing in the ooze – had lately fallen over, and Captain Quinn had watched him do it.

‘After a very few days, Prendergast,’ I overheard him saying to Oamer, ‘I anticipate that things will be running like clockwork.’

As Scholes struggled to his feet, young William Harvey, trying to shake a clod of earth off his shovel, nearly brained young Alfred Tinsley, who shaped to give him a belt in return. They’d been needling each other for the past hour. Tinsley, as usual, had been talking trains, and William had said, ‘The war’s the thing now, not railways. Personally, I’m glad to be clear of them.’

Captain Quinn watched Oamer separate the pair. Then it was my turn to take a spill into the ditch we were accidentally making (for all the water in the field seemed to be running rapidly into our trench). Quinn climbed onto the horse with which he’d been equipped, saying to Oamer, ‘In summer, Corporal, conditions here would have been very nearly ideal.’

After he’d departed, Oamer asked Andy and Roy Butler to give us all a demonstration of digging, which meant in practice that they gave each other a demonstration of digging. The first thing that told you they knew their way around a shovel was that they called it a blade.

‘Tha needs ter clean t’blade,’ Roy said to Andy.

‘Aye?’ said Andy, taking the role of the apprentice, and giggling back at Roy, ‘Wha’ever fower?’

Roy then touched Andy on the shoulder, and half whispered, ‘Ask me ’ow.’

‘’Ow,’ said Andy. ‘Ow do I clean it?’

Roy produced a wooden wedge from his tunic pocket, holding it up like a magician, which set them both laughing fit to bust. Oamer was looking at me and shaking his head, and Oliver Butler, who’d seen him do it, was scowling at both of us. But the twins were better at teaching digging than the army instructors. The main thing was to pat down the sides of the hole as you dug. Roy and Andy made a big thing of this, and turned it into a singing jig, which they performed while slapping with their shovels the sides of the trench. As far as I could make sense of the words, they ran along these lines:

‘Batter ’em, flatten ’em,

Flatter ’em, splatter ’em,

Don’t leave yer ’ole

’Til yer stuff’s packed flatter ’n that ’n’ mum.’

(Because as well as calling shovels ‘blades’, they called earth ‘stuff’.)

The pressing question, it seemed to me, was: Are this pair actually dangerous? From the look on the face of William Harvey, he thought so, and I knew he’d spoken to Oamer about sleeping away from them in the barn.

Apart from digging, we were told off in pairs for sentry-go. A control point was made on the road leading onto Spurn consisting of three oil drums, two planks of wood and a charcoal brazier. Barbed wire was laid in the fields to either side. In this and the digging, we alternated with the other section from the battalion: we were Shift A, they were Shift B. Most of the traffic that came by was to help with the building of the railway along Spurn, construction of which had started from the opposite end – from the tip, Spurn Point.

The password was ‘Skeleton’.

One morning, when I was doubled-up with Scholes, we were approached by a party of schoolkids from the villages of Kilnsea and its neighbour, Easington.

‘Password,’ said Scholes.

They didn’t know it.

‘Look here,’ I said to the kid in the lead, ‘is there a school on Spurn?’ (For we’d been