The Somme Stations

I contemplated telling her that she was a sadist, plain and simple. Then I thought to ask: ‘Who was that man?’ (We could still hear his brisk retreating footsteps on the gravel of the drive.)

‘He’s in the Military Mounted Police.’

Being in a kind of daze, I said, ‘Well, I didn’t see his horse.’

‘He came by train.’

‘What does he want with Jim?’

And so, Lillian, I gave Oldfield the opportunity of experiencing the most wonderful pleasure, for she said:

‘I see no reason why I shouldn’t tell you. He means to take your husband in charge.’

‘Why? On what charge?’

‘On a charge of murder.’

‘Well then. There has obviously been a mistake.’

‘Sergeant Major Thackeray’, she said, nodding towards the opened gate, which the man in the red-covered hat was now walking through, wheeling to the right, as though giving himself marching orders, ‘has come all the way from France expressly to bring the charge, so I shouldn’t think there’s been a mistake. I am to be responsible for making sure that on returning to these premises, your husband does not quit his room before the gentleman returns in the morning.’

I might have fainted at that moment… only a light snow was beginning to fall in the gardens of Ardenlea. The snowflakes that touched my face had a reviving effect.

‘When Jim returns’, I said to Oldfield, ‘he will be unconscious.’

She nodded.

‘And he can’t walk anyway…’

She nodded again.

‘So I should have thought that keeping him here would be well within your powers.’

I turned on my boot-heel and walked. (Not that I knew where I was going.) It is now nearly midnight, and I will return to Ardenlea in a moment, posting this on the way. Not a word of this to the children, dearest. I don’t know how to thank you for all your kindness in looking after them. As you now see, I cannot hope to be there on Friday, but will write again tomorrow.

With all my love, as ever,

Lydia.

PART ONE.Blighty

York: September 1914

In the North Eastern Railway police office, which faced on to platforms four and thirteen at York station, Constable Scholes was telling how he’d lately encountered a man who had been carrying an owl in a Third Class carriage of a train going between Leeds and York. Scholes was talking, as ever, to his best pal, Constable Flower. Being only constables, the two shared a desk, and at that moment Flower was sitting at it and Scholes was sitting upon it, by which any man who knew the office would have been able to tell that the Chief wasn’t about. I was listening in while assembling the papers for the prosecution on a charge of Indecent Exposure of a man called John Read who’d walked out of the Gentlemen’s lavatory on platform eight while in a state of undress.

But the story of the owl man had my attention for the present. He had worn the bird on his wrist, ‘like a watch’, and when asked what he was about had said the owl was his companion, and went everywhere with him.

‘I told him it was against the by-laws,’ Scholes was saying, at which Flower, who had the Police Manual on his knee, gave chapter and verse: ‘It’s against company by-law number eleven.’

‘Exactly,’ said Scholes. ‘So the bloke… Which number did you say again?’

‘Eleven,’ said Flower. ‘No wait, that’s “Entering or Leaving a Train in Motion”.’ He turned the pages of the book. ‘Here we are: by-law fourteen. “Carriage of Animals in… a Carriage.” Let’s see what he would have been liable for.’

‘It makes no odds, since I don’t have his name and address,’ said Scholes.

‘Forty shillings maximum for a first offence,’ said Flower, ignoring Scholes, ‘or five pounds if he’s done it before.’

‘I never took his name,’ Scholes repeated. ‘I said to him, “You’ll get off at York, and you’ll walk quickly out of the station and you’ll not come back with that thing.” He said, “Will I now?” I said, “Yes, you flipping well will.” He said “Well how do you expect the owl to get back to Leeds?”’

‘It could fly,’ Flower put in. ‘It was a bird, after all.’

‘It was attached to his wrist by a leather strap.’

‘And what happened then?’ asked Flower.

‘He got off the train and went through the ticket gate.’

The interesting part of their conversation was over, so I looked up from the cards and said, ‘Where’s the Chief?’ at which Scholes climbed off the desk. (The word ‘Chief’ was enough to make him do it.)

‘Old station, I think,’ said Flower.

The old station, which was across the way from the new one, had been taken over by the military, and the Chief was very thick with that lot. I looked down at the papers relating to Read. Without paying attention to the detail of the case (he seldom did that) the Chief had expressed surprise that I’d arrested a bloke on this charge. ‘I’ve never run a fellow in for indecent exposure,’ he’d told me, seeming to take a pride in the fact, and the Police Manual did urge that the greatest care be taken in such cases, since ‘the charges are sometimes made by nervous or hysterical females on the most slender evidence’.

Where Read had gone wrong was in exposing himself to the wife of an Alderman and the sister of the Chairman of the York Corporation Finance Committee, and there’d been nothing hysterical about that pair. They had testified that Read’s member had been clearly displayed but was ‘not in a state of tumescence’, which was an odd thing to say, as though the two were very experienced as witnesses in these sorts of cases, and usually the members were in a state of tumescence. (It was just the right word – I’d looked it up after questioning them.) But then again Read himself, a broken down man in the middle fifties, had had no answer to the charge. He’d left the Gentlemen’s, he told me, in ‘rather a hurry’. ‘Why?’ I asked him, and he kept silence for a long time before replying, ‘I wanted to go to the Post Office.’

I stuffed the papers back in the pasteboard envelope. Read had exposed himself on the day the war started, and I wondered whether the two events had been related. There’d been some strange behaviour since August 4th, and the numbers of Drunk and Incapables on the station had practically doubled.

I stood up and took off my suit-coat, which was something Scholes and Flower, being uniformed men, were not allowed to do – which perhaps served to remind them why they didn’t care for my company. Anyhow they both just then quit the office to go on station patrol. Scholes would take the ‘Up’ side, Flower the ‘Down’ (or the other way about), with many meetings for a chat on the footbridge. It was two-thirty on a hot, sleepy afternoon, and I had the place to myself.

I stood in the office doorway with my coat over my shoulder, and watched a London train pull out of the ‘Up’. As it moved, it revealed the platform across the way, the main ‘Down’, which was crowded with sweating excursionists, shortly to depart for points north. In the first fortnight of the war, the station had been full of trippers returning home, breaking off from holidays because of the emergency, but now folk had started going away again, and the ones who’d come back and lost their holidays as a result felt daft. Buffets in brown paper and bottles of lemonade were being passed out among the excursionists – all adults but they looked like a school party, excited at getting their grub. Half of them didn’t know which way to face to look for the train. As I watched them, I saw Old Man Wright, the police office clerk, moving at a lick through their ranks, making for the footbridge and looking like he meant business. I knew then that something was up; that somebody would be in bother, for Wright fed on the