The Somme Stations

brassard – read it out loud in my amazement: ‘VTC’. Was it some part of the army? But the Chief was sixty-five. He couldn’t be with the colours. He couldn’t be at the front either, but he damn near was.

‘Volunteer Training Corps,’ said the Chief, and he looked sidelong, embarrassed. As he moved his small, scarred, gingery head, his cap seemed to stay still, being too big for him.

‘But… what’s in the bag, sir?’

‘Don’t “sir” me. I’m not an officer, am I?’

He indicated the three stripes on his arm. I smiled at him, and it was the first time ever that I’d been amused by the Chief without also being nervous.

‘You’ve just the two,’ he said, indicating my own stripes. ‘Your missus’ll be up in arms about that, I suppose. She’ll be storming the bloody War Office.’

The Chief was trying to address me after his old fashion, but he wasn’t quite up to it. Then I recalled that he ought to have known that the business on Spurn had held back my promotion.

‘Didn’t you get my letter, Chief?’

‘What bloody letter?’

Behind me, Alfred Tinsley was returning from around the corner.

‘Just had the nod from Dawson, Jim,’ he said. ‘He’s found a likely place down there. Will you come along now or shall we see you later?’

This was a pretty half-hearted sort of invitation. Were the pair of them fleeing the Chief? Then again, it would be obvious to anyone that the Chief and I had a lot to talk about and so might be better left to ourselves.

I said to Tinsley, ‘Right-o, we’ll see you shortly.’

The Chief was eyeing me. ‘The army’s given you a pair of shoulders at last.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I know how to stand now.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, lad,’ said the Chief. ‘Look, for Christ’s sake, let’s get a belt of booze.’

So I indicated the estaminet I’d just come out of.

When we came to the bottom of the stairs, the woman didn’t hold up the little blackboard for the benefit of the Chief. She could immediately see that here was a man who didn’t really eat, but lived on smoke and alcohol. I asked her for a bottle of white wine, and took the Chief over to the table I’d quit ten minutes before. The bar was a brighter, bluer place now, with a few more Tommies in, and a stream of chatter and clinking glass.

‘How long have you been out here?’ I asked the Chief, pouring wine.

‘Getting on for a fortnight,’ he said, taking a box of cigars from his tunic pocket.

‘And before that you were in York?’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘worse luck.’

Again this sounded a wrong note. The old Chief didn’t go in for that self-pitying tone. I thought again of the letter I’d written him – the one I’d given to Oamer for posting at Romescamps. Had Oamer deliberately kept it back? He certainly wouldn’t have forgotten to deliver it. Then again letters from the front very often went astray, as did letters sent to the Chief. Any communication without the immediacy of a bullet could take its chances as far as he was concerned. I’d seen him start the fire in the police office with unopened correspondence.

‘The Volunteer Training Corps,’ I said, taking a pull on the wine (which showed no advance on the earlier bottle). ‘I think I’ve vaguely heard of it.’

‘Aye,’ said the Chief, lighting his cigar, and pushing the box over to me. ‘Well don’t strain yourself trying to remember. We’re a sort of home defence militia,’ he continued, blowing smoke. ‘We stand about in the middle of York looking out for Zeppelins… Investigate reports of German spies.’

‘Why aren’t you an officer?’ I said.

‘Officer,’ he said, with contempt.

The Chief was working class by birth. That’s why he’d lit his own cigar before passing the box over to me. He was a fist fighter of old (hence the state of his nose), but not by Queens-berry Rules. He’d risen within the police but that didn’t signify socially. He could be a chief inspector whilst remaining true to himself, whereas he would have to have become a different man altogether if he’d been a commissioned army officer. Consequently, he’d stopped at sergeant major in the York and Lancaster regiment – out in the boiling desert with General Gordon and all those other red-coated lunatics. After his thirty years with the colours, he’d been in the Reserves for as long as possible, but now he was reduced to balloon-spotting in this funny rig-out.

At least he was still on the big cigars, though. Lighting up my own Marcella, I asked again, ‘What’s in the bag, Chief?’

‘Cigarettes,’ he growled, and I knew the explanation for this, and the whole question of what he was doing in Albert, would have to wait.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘The Somme battle – your lot were in on the start. What sort of show is it?’

‘Well, I’ve seen some pretty warm times,’ I said, blowing smoke, and feeling like a fraud.

Whereas being in the war had killed many men, I could see that not being in it was killing the Chief. With him, everything was upside-down. Most patriotic men resented those of their fellows who didn’t fight. The Chief resented those that did. Accordingly I was torn as I spoke to him. I didn’t want to make myself out a hero. Then again, I could see him glazing over as I told him our mudlarking exploits – the trench digging and fixing. He was hungry for details of being under fire; he seemed fascinated by ordnance – all the gauges of shell I’d dodged. And then there was his obsession of old: machine guns.

‘You’ve felt the bullet go close?’ he said. ‘The little wind?’

I nodded and, seeing that the Chief looked quite defeated at missing out on this experience, I added, ‘Only once or twice, mind.’

I reserved the full story of William Harvey for our second bottle. In the meantime I gave the Chief tales of a fusiliersapper’s life. When I told him about Burton Dump and the lines going forward that would be brought into regular use from Monday onwards, he couldn’t help but grinning.

‘It was railways that started this show; looks like they’ll finish it as well.’

‘How did they start it?’

‘The Huns had to be sure they could defend to the east while attacking to the west. See – ’

I thought he was going to show me the disposition of the German armies using wine glasses and cigars, so I cut in:

‘But what are you up to, Chief? I mean, why are you out here?’

Since he couldn’t put me off any longer, he explained fast, as though the business was just too daft for words. The Chief, who had practically run the York railwaymen’s shooting leagues, had got up a ‘shooting party’ – him and some of his superannuated mates in the Volunteer Training Corps. They’d given demonstrations of marksmanship or failing that (since not all had retained A1 vision as the Chief had) general gun-craft. At first they’d toured the army camps in and around York. Now they were visiting some of the rest camps in France.

‘The troops hate to be out-shot by an old cunt like me,’ said the Chief. ‘It spurs them on. If they do beat us, we give ’em cigarettes by way of a prize. We have army fags gratis from one of the York quartermasters, but…’

He was holding up the empty bottle, frowning at it.

I called for another.

‘… But what we get from the quarter bloke’, he ran on, ‘is that powdery army stuff. Boy tobacco… So I lay out myself for decent fags from time to time…’

‘I’ve taken up regular smoking,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’ said the Chief. ‘Well, you need a hobby.’ He was reaching into the bag, saying, ‘I got this lot from a little market they have here – ’

I said, ‘Are they Woodbines, by any chance?’

‘What do you want?’ said the Chief, ‘Jam on it?’ He put a hundred fags on the table in front of me, the packets marked ‘Virginians Select’.

‘For me?’ I said.

The Chief nodded.

‘I’m obliged to you. Now what’s going on at York station?’

The Chief pulled a face: ‘Half the porters are bloody women.’

The wife had told me that in one of her letters – leaving out the ‘bloody’.

‘How do they get on?’