The Somme Stations

I was one of the last ones off the pier, and into the Hope and Anchor. The main part of it was a hall with a stove and makeshift stage. There was pile of kindling next to the stove, and Alfred Tinsley was using it to get the fire going. I put my pack and my rifle where the other blokes had put theirs: on the stage. There was a regular warren of little rooms at the back of the hall, behind the stage, and we’d have one of these apiece for kip. After a bit of sluice-down in the jakes it was seven o’clock, and I was ready for my tea. As I walked back into the hall, young Tinsley – who looked odd with a pint in his hand – was talking to Scholes about our absent friend, young William.

‘If he tells me one more time that throwing a bomb is easy as anything… I swear I’ll brain him,’ Scholes was saying.

Tinsley nodded: ‘And if I hear one more time that story about how he had bad teeth, and was worried he’d be rejected as unfit for service, so he went to the flipping dentists, and they pulled them out for free so’s he could do his patriotic duty…’

Oamer strolled over to them, pipe on the go, and Scholes asked him, ‘What exactly is Harvey telling these farmers?’

‘The times when the guns go off,’ said Oamer.

‘But what can they do about it? Clap their hands over their ears?’

‘They’ve to open windows in their houses,’ said Oamer, ‘… it’s to equalise the pressure, you know.’

‘He’ll be popular,’ said Scholes, ‘… weather like this.’

The place was village hall-like. I could just see the RE boys holding smoking concerts here. There was a piano on the stage; propped at the back of it was a giant mock-up of the Royal Engineers’ crest, and our packs and rifles were clustered around that. On the front edge of the stage the beer barrels – branded with the word ‘Smith’s’ – rested. Dawson was alongside them, superintending. I eyed him carefully; he looked all right so far. As a unit we’d drunk together only once before – at the above-mentioned Crown and Anchor in Kilnsea – and on that occasion we’d put the peg in after two pints apiece.

There was a stove in the centre of the room, a pile of papers and a basket of coal next to it for fuel, our supper bubbling away in a dixie on top. Alongside this, a trestle table was loaded with cutlery and enamel plates; jumbled round about were little wooden chairs, some with newspapers on them. From the roof beams hung Union Jacks and hurricane lamps in alternation. There were chalk marks on the floor, which was gritty with sand; these marks had numbers next to them, for the playing of some game made up by the RE boys – and there was a hoops board on the wall nearby, with a full complement of hoops hanging from the hooks.

We all had a couple of pints before setting about the food. Alfred Tinsley served it out, and it was either soup or stew depending on what his spoon brought up. I asked Dawson, who’d spoken to the bloke who’d delivered it, ‘What’d he say this was? I mean, did he give any clue?’

Dawson shrugged. ‘He said it was “something in the way of grub”.’

‘That’s a very good description of it,’ I said.

I was already feeling slightly canned. The beer was John Smith’s strongest variety, or had been made so by the way it was kept. Scholes was at the piano now, playing something slow and grand, which made a bit of a mockery of the clattering of cutlery as the blokes at the trestle table put away their stew.

‘Liszt?’ Oamer called over.

Scholes replied, ‘Sonata in B minor – don’t know it all.’

And he broke off in embarrassment.

‘I’ve heard Egypt’s on the cards for us,’ said Oliver Butler, mopping his plate with bread, and eyeing every man in turn.

‘Egypt?’ somebody said, flabbergasted.

‘Fighting the darkies.’

‘What darkies?’ Scholes called over, taking a pull from his glass before placing it on the piano top.

‘I don’t bloody know,’ said Butler. ‘Full of darkies, is Egypt. Some of them are Turkish. Overrun with the bloody Turks just at present, is Egypt.’

I was watching Oamer. He’d been smoking his pipe after his meal – his ‘post-prandial’ smoke, as he called it – but he now removed it from his mouth and stood. Dawson called out ‘Bide!’ on his behalf, and silence fell.

‘Your conversation, gentlemen,’ said Oamer, ‘has anticipated an announcement that Captain Quinn has asked me to make this evening.’

Scholes shut the piano lid, and walked over to the trestle table.

‘We are off to Egypt?’ someone gasped.

‘You are off’, said Oamer, speaking in such a way as to prove he didn’t normally use that word in that way, ‘to France – because that’s where the war is. And you are going next Thursday, when, after three days’ home leave – ’

(A small cheer at this.)

‘ – you will entrain from Hull to a sea port I am not at liberty to name, before proceeding to… somewhere I am also not at liberty to name in France.’

Oamer took two papers from his tunic pocket, and glanced down at the first, saying, ‘Captain Quinn has asked me to read the following: “Tell the men that I wish them all a very happy time on leave, short though it is. I know they will honour the battalion and the brigade in France, and I hope they may all come through the whole war safely.” He has also asked me to pass this amongst you.’ So saying, he handed this second paper to Scholes, who looked at it with a face like yesterday. ‘Captain Quinn will be here to address you himself in the morning,’ Oamer continued. Then he looked at his watch: ‘We turn in at ten o’clock, gentlemen.’

Silence in the room as each man figured his own picture of life at the front. Presently, the second paper came my way. It was a list, badly typed, giving further instances of North Eastern railway-men serving with other battalions who’d shown valour in the field. One of them, a fellow called Arnold Hogg, I knew. He was a clerk in the York goods station. He was serving with the West Riding Royal Field Artillery, and he’d been awarded the French Medaille Militaire. It didn’t say exactly what he’d done, but it must have been in aid of the French. At the presentation, a French Infantry Regiment had given him a guard of honour. I thought of Hogg: a big, round-faced bloke puffing and blowing as he rode his bike against the wind along Station Road. I could not imagine that guard of honour. Or at any rate, I could not imagine the blokes in it keeping a straight face.

I’d now had three pints and needed to drain off. I put on my cap, and opened the door of the Hope – with difficulty, for the wind was going all out to keep it shut. There was a great roaring that was either the sea or the wind, or both. The first lash of the rain nearly felled me and I was sodden by the time I reached the dark jakes. I knew there were candle stubs littered about in the place, but the flames had burnt out; the matches in my pocket were now useless, and there was no moon. The wind echoed strangely inside the brick cubicle, and made the sound of the flushing undetectable.

When I regained the Hope, a general chatter had started up again, and the twins were walking over to the hoops board. I watched them while drying at the stove. One of the pair – the brightest, Roy – made two chalk marks at the top of the little blackboard fixed alongside. These marks might have said ‘Roy’ and ‘Andy’, although not in a way generally recognisable. Roy took aim first. He threw three hoops. None landed on a hook, and after each one, Andy called out, ‘Missed, Roy-boy!’

Was this how the beer took the twins? (They’d put away as much as anyone save Dawson.) Or was it just their usual, wild way of going on? The queer thing was that they were both soon playing to a decent standard, and I recalled that they’d shown themselves decent marksmen at Alexandra Dock. (Well, it was known that platelayers, since they worked in the fields all day, spent half their time taking pot-shots at rabbits.)

Come nine-fifteen, Oamer was sitting on the edge of the stage with his pipe and a book, and Dawson, self- appointed custodian of the barrels, was filling glasses. The storm was blasting away outside. At the table, the topic of discussion was how the RE men would keep cases on the ships entering the Humber Estuary.

‘They send a man out, don’t they?’ said Scholes.

‘I wouldn’t fancy that job,’ I said, ‘going up to a dirty great German destroyer in a little rowing boat.’

‘But it might not be a German destroyer, remember,’ said Alfred Tinsley.

‘I suppose, if the blokes on the ship sink the bloke in the rowing boat, then that’s a bit of a giveaway.’

We’d both gone a bit daft with the beer.