The Somme Stations

told nothing about it.)

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t be going there.’

I looked at Scholes, and he was standing with his eyes closed, as if he could transport himself elsewhere by so-doing. Scholes shouldn’t have been a policeman, and he certainly wasn’t cut out for a soldier. He was plum scared of going to France, I knew. He spent most of his guard turns staring out to the high ships and playing mournful tunes on the penny whistle that he’d brought with him in lieu of his flute. I let the kids through – if they were German spies, I would take the knock.

In fact, there was a school on Spurn, as we discovered when the master came along five minutes after. When that bloke had gone through, Scholes looked at the perfectly clear blue sky and said, ‘A storm’s due.’ He’d heard this from one of the B Shift men, who’d had it from the farmer they lodged with. Scholes then asked me what I made of Oliver Butler.

‘Mmm… Tricky customer,’ I said.

‘Fascinated by you, he is. Always plugging me for particulars. What were you like in the police office? Were you up to the mark as a plain clothes man?’

‘Snoopy bugger,’ I said.

‘And Dawson,’ said Scholes, ‘what about him?’

I said I considered him a thoroughly white bloke.

Scholes said, ‘It’s a bit weird being at close quarters with him. In York, I pulled him in twice.’

I asked ‘What for?’ but I already knew.

‘Drunk and Incapable.’

‘On the station?’

‘Aye.’

‘Has he ever mentioned it?’

‘It’s never come up, no. It’s as if he’s blotted it out of his memory.’

‘Did he go away?’ I asked, because you might get a week in a gaol for second time Drunk and Incapable.

‘Fined thirty shillings the first time, forty shillings the next. The second time I had to blow the whistle for Fowler.’

‘Resisted, did he?’

‘Just a bit of lip, really. Not much more than that. Flower wanted him charged with assault, but I talked him round. Didn’t seem worth getting the bloke lagged.’

Any other grade of railwayman would have been stood down for drunkenness, but the porters were all boozy, and known to be so. I reminded Scholes of the run-in the Chief and I had had with Dawson in the Bootham Hotel, and he said, ‘Did you know he’s been warned off half the pubs in York?’

‘Well,’ I said, warming my hands at the brazier, ‘it’s a good thing he doesn’t hold a grudge.’

‘But how do we know he doesn’t?’ said Scholes.

That evening, we were in our makeshift cribs in the barn, one oil lamp to every two men. Scholes was playing his whistle in the farmyard outside in the dark. He’d said the smoke from the brazier made his eyes smart, at which Bernie Dawson had muttered to me, ‘You know, I don’t think he’s going to like the Western Front very much.’

We’d been warned by Oamer to expect news of a duty that would take us onto the actual peninsula for the first time. Meanwhile we were killing time, and listening to Scholes.

Young Alfred Tinsley, the next bloke along from me, was sucking a peppermint and reading the Railway Magazine – lost in it, he was. On the cover, I read ‘Don’t forget your friend in the services. Buy him a Railway Magazine!’ I hadn’t had that particular number yet. It would probably be waiting for me at Hull, the wife having sent it on from Thorpe. I was just then trying to write to the wife. In my last letter I told her that I was unable to disclose our location, and she’d written back saying, ‘Would it be Kilnsea, East Yorks? Because that’s what the postmark says.’ I was now writing that it might be and it might not be, but she should keep in mind that incoming letters were soon to be read by officers as well as outgoing.

‘Who are you writing to?’ asked Oliver Butler.

‘Mind your own fucking business,’ I said.

‘Everywhere one goes, the spirit of merry badinage in the air,’ said Oamer, who’d just stepped into the barn. (Scholes had also come in behind him.)

‘What’s the special duty, Corporal?’ came the voice of young William, who had his crib on the other side of wooden partition, next to Oamer’s – his bolthole from the twins.

‘Bide,’ said Oamer.

This was the nearest he ever came to saying ‘Shut up’, and he was eyeing the twins, who hadn’t yet left off with their secret whisperings. Presently, Oamer said, ‘Be it known by all…’ which was his way of beginning an announcement. He then told us that the Spurn military railway very nearly was half completed.

‘Oh good-o,’ said Oliver Butler.

According to Oamer, it now ran from a railway pier at the tip of the peninsula to a spot somewhere in the middle. Tomorrow, we were to march to that spot, and there we’d board the train and be conveyed to the pier.

‘That’s a bit of all right,’ said Alfred Tinsley, because here was a railway for him to look at.

‘Why are we going to the railway pier, Corporal?’ asked Oliver Butler.

‘You are to unload a ship,’ said Oamer, ‘… quite a small ship, you will be pleased to hear.’

Digesting this news, we all turned in for the night, and every lamp in the barn was soon extinguished except the one from Oamer’s (and William’s) side of the petition, which continued to burn low. Oamer would no doubt be writing to… well, whoever he wrote to.

I couldn’t get off to sleep. I turned on my side; I heard a sort of grunt from the direction of Oamer, and then the noise hit. It did hit as well; the whole barn rocked, and every man instantly sat up. Every man was talking as well, but I couldn’t make out a word; soft muffles seemed to fall from every mouth, even though I knew everyone was shouting. The Chief had once told me that a bloke in the Riflemen’s Leagues at York had fired one of the big bore ones indoors without ear defenders. He burst both his ear drums, and the way he knew about it was that he couldn’t hear the mechanism when he re-loaded the gun, and then he felt a tickling above his collar – the blood running down from his ears.

I put my hand up to my own neck, and there was no blood, but still my hearing wasn’t right. After a space, the word being repeatedly spoken by Oamer, ‘Bide… bide!’ became clear, but it was no use against the shouting of the others, and one shout I heard above all: ‘It’s the bloody war,’ said Scholes, ‘it’s come here… it’s bloody come here.’ Then the farmer came into the barn dressed in his night shirt with an Ulster coat slung over the top but no bloody trousers or underclothes on, so his privates were in plain view. In a right state, he was. Evidently half the windows in his house had smashed.

‘What in hell’s name’s going on here?’ he shouted at Oamer, but he’d been followed in by Captain Quinn, who addressed us while buttoning up his tunic. He would be riding down to the peninsula to make sure, but he believed that the Royal Engineers had fired one of their 9.2-inch guns – ‘almost certainly not in anger’, but merely to test it.

‘Well, I’d say it was working,’ muttered Dawson.

‘Now if I’m wrong over this,’ Quinn continued, ‘and this is in fact a German battle group firing on us, then that puts a rather different complexion on matters…’ We could rest assured he would be telephoning through to battalion headquarters from the Spurn redoubt directly.

He wheeled about and was gone, at which all eyes were fixed on Young William. He was sitting on the dusty flags and fighting for breath, just as though he’d run a mile at full pelt. Oamer made towards him, and the kid brushed him off, saying in an under-breath something like, ‘Will you leave go of me?’ in a way that could have landed him in very hot water indeed, if our corporal had been a different sort of person.

The Spurn railway terminated hard by a wooden hut that served as an officers’ mess for the Royal Engineers. Someone had chalked a message on the bare wood of the shed door: ‘Tom, Telephone down to Henry. Regards, Max’, and that’s the kind of set-up it was. The officers were easy-going blokes, more university professors than soldiers; they seemed to run Spurn like their own gentlemen’s club.

The mess, and the temporary terminus, were bang in the middle of Spurn, in a part of it called the Narrows. There was beach at not more than thirty yards’ distance on either side of the track. Just then the sea did not