Never Such Innocence Again E-Book

Giles Ekins

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

1914. The clouds of war are gathering across Europe, but life in the Durham village of Ashbrook Stills carries on as it has for generations, the miners and farmers unmindful of the catastrophe that is about to engulf their world and put them all in danger.

The Garforth family lies at the epicentre of the upcoming change, as the young men of the village eagerly heed the Call to Arms and rush to enlist. Soon, young Edgar Garforth finds himself fighting for his life on the beaches of Gallipoli, as his brothers also enlist in Kitchener's' Army, ready to do their duty for King and Country.

Suffused with pride and anxiety, their family can only hope and pray for their survival. But will any of them make it back home alive?

Leseprobe

NEVER SUCH INNOCENCE AGAIN

GILES EKINS

CONTENTS

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Part II

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Notes

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About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 Giles Ekins

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Edited by Tyler Colins

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

NEVER SUCH INNOCENCE AGAIN

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

4th stanza

MCMXIV (1914)

Philip Larkin.

Dedicated to Patricia, as always with my love.

PROLOGUE

Immutable, as permanent as the earth itself.

We will remember them.

The War Memorial in the village of Ashbrook Stills in the county of Durham, stands at the junction of Whitton Lane and Ashbrook Road. It is a grey granite obelisk, standing proudly on a tiered plinth upon which are laid the poppy wreaths on Remembrance Sunday.

It is some nine feet tall and is inscribed with the names of men from the village and surrounding countryside who died for their country in the Great War of 1914-18.

In 1914, the population of the village stood at 267 men, women and children. Twenty-nine of them are commemorated on the Memorial. Seven more names were added after World War II. Below the list of names, the stanza of a poem reads:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

In 1953, Councillor Mrs Edwardes donated a wooden bench in memory of her husband Percy, a survivor of the trenches whose lungs finally gave out after having been gassed in the Ypres Salient in 1917. The bench sits alongside the memorial; old women, many of the widows of those whose names are on the roll, used to sit to rest there on sunny days as they walked down to the Post Office to collect their pensions.

If you carry on down Whitton Lane, you will come to the rows of miners’ cottages built in 1848 when the mine, Pit No 1, was first sunk. The cottages, six rows in all, running from the derelict railway line up to Whitton Lane, are all identical. The front door, which was rarely ever opened except for a wedding or a funeral, leads directly into the two-up two-down cottages with kitchens at the back. An entry passage, serving four houses, leads into the backyard where the privy used to be, and where the back gate leads out onto the back lane.

The streets are all named after Queen Victoria and her family.

At the top, naturally, stands Victoria Street with Albert Street next (never very popular), followed in quick succession by Edward Street, Alice Street, Alfred Street, and Helena Street. They stopped building then, because No 2 Pit proved to be so wet and thin-seamed as to be unprofitable.

The pit head buildings, which were a couple of hundred yards beyond the cottages, have been dismantled for some years now. The tall stone engine house, with the dragon-breathing steam winder that drove the huge fly wheel and cable drum (built in 1852 by J.C. Joicey of Newcastle upon Tyne), was a masterpiece of Victorian industrial engineering.

Next to the engine house stood the heapstead building, standing directly over the mineshaft with the great spinning headstock pulleys guiding the cables that sent down the cages full of men, and brought up the tubs full of coal from the depths below. It was thought that those pulleys would turn forever; they seemed moulded into the earth, immutable, as permanent as the earth itself.

The spoil heaps have been grassed over now, and a stand of new trees follows the line of the railway tracks that used to carry the coal to the Penshaw Staithes on the River Wear or the Dutton Staithes on the Tyne, there to be loaded onto colliers and shipped all around the country, to East Anglia and the Thames, and across the North Sea to Scandinavia and the Baltic.

The pit cottages are still there, but the spirit that lived with them died with the closing of the mine; they are still cottages, homes even, but they are homes without soul, the very reason for their existence died years ago.

The 'Green Tree' pub is still there on Whitton Lane, at the bottom of the hill that leads up to the village of Bitchburn, too small to be even called a village, merely a single street of houses by what used to be the Queen Mary Drift Mine, also long since closed. The names of the dead of Bitchburn are also commemorated on the Memorial.

Number 2 Ashbrook Road is the first house on Ashbrook Road and is where Mrs Ida Cantley used to live. Ida, who died in April 1995 when she was 98, had lived there ever since her marriage to Jackson Wragg in 1913, moving two doors up the road from number 6 where she had been born in 1897, Queen Victoria’s Jubilee year. Widowed in 1916, when Jackson had been killed on the Somme, she married Fred Cantley in 1924 and was widowed again in 1929, when gas exploded in No 1 Pit, killing 17 miners.

Ida lived alone for the best part of 65 years. Her children had long since left home and scattered far and wide. Only her youngest daughter, Mary, used to visit regularly, every two months or so, but Ida did not feel lonely or neglected.

She had her memories and as she sat by her front room window, she could see the War Memorial without even turning her head. She drew great comfort from it; even after more than 75 years, it solaced her to know that Jackson Wragg’s name had not been forgotten.

Her tears had long since dried but the pride she felt for the fallen lived with her until the day she died. When the Boy Scouts, Freemasons and old soldiers stood to observe a minute’s silence by the Memorial on Remembrance Sunday, her heart seemed fit to burst with pride and it was as well to have a hankie tucked in her sleeve, as the tears sparkled at the corner of her eyes.

Ida had known that she had not much time to live; the hard winters seemed harder to get through than ever before, but the prospect of her death had not dismayed her. She knew she would be re-united with Wragg and Cantley, who had been good friends to each other and good, if brief, husbands to her, and after she had gone, the Memorial would live on forever, of that she had no doubts.

The Memorial would live on forever.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,

We will remember them.

PART1

ONE

July 1914

'I hope it may'nt be human gore.'

Mary Blackett Garforth dozed fitfully in her chair. She was desperately tired, in fact she could hardly remember a time in her life when she had not been tired, no, not just tired, exhausted to bone-weary numbness, drained to a point beyond fatigue. Possibly as a child maybe, but even then, she would have had to help her mother look after her brothers and sisters, carry the water for her Dad’s bath, help with the washing and the baking, run errands and black the stove.

At 13, she had gone into service at 'the Big House' as Exham Hall, ancestral seat of the Lords Exham, was known, and life as a 'tweenie' had not been conducive to leisure or an excess of sleep either, especially when old Mrs Lankester, the master’s mother -in-law, had still been alive, as vicious an old bitch as ever had been; nothing could ever be right for old Mrs Lankester. No matter how hard you tried, she would always find fault and box your ears, she made you bend over her bath chair and keep still as she smacked her leathery hand, full tilt, at the side of the head.

'Take that, girl, and if you can't do better next time, you 'll be all the sorrier for it’. Or worse still, she would smack her walking stick onto your knuckles, often until they bled.

She had been hateful and petty, and Mary had been glad, no, ecstatic, when she died, and even though she prayed hard for forgiveness for harbouring such un-Christian thoughts, nothing could replace the relief when the old witch was finally laid to rest in the family plot. 'And good riddance to you', Mary had thought as the coffin was lowered into the grave. All the staff had been allowed two hours off, without pay, to attend the funeral and had stood, heads bowed, at a discreet distance, away from the graveside and Mary could bet every single farthing she owned that not one of the other gardening or domestic staff felt sorrow or grief at old Mrs Lankester’s passing.

Things were better after that, when she became Lady Exham’s personal maid, still tired, of course, but tiredness was simply a way of life and she remained as maid to Lady Exham until she died in an accident in 1897 when following the Hunt—trying to put a 3'0’ horse at a 4'0’ fence was how Mr Brindley, the butler, had put it in his usually sneery way, curling his lip as he spoke, his moustache crawling up into his nostrils like a hairy slug.

Butter wouldn't melt in Brindley’s mouth above stairs, bowing and scraping and licking the master’s boots until his tongue was as black as a coal scuttle whilst, below stairs, he hadn't a good word to say for any of the family. He was forever asking Mary to go into the cellar with him, but Cookie said she knew what he was after and told him to keep his wandering hands to himself.

Then, in 1898, Mary had married Jack Garforth and moved down from Exham Hall to Victoria Street. Then, she had really learned what tiredness meant.

She was Jack’s second wife and he had come with a ready built-in family, Jack himself, Joe the eldest boy, Daniel, Mary Margaret, always both names together, as if they were joined into one, Mary-Margaret. No one could remember how Mary Margaret came to be called that; she wasn't christened that way, as though it were a double name like the gentry sometimes did, it had just happened.

Margaret Mary followed and then there was Harold, sneery, thin, creepy Harold, burning with sullen resentment at the world, who always seemed to be somewhere else, or at least his mind was. She tried to love all of Jack’s children as her own, but there was something unlovable about Harold; the way he looked at her reminded her of Brindley at 'the Big House'.

Mary did not like being in the house alone with Harold. He never did anything untoward, never touched her or said anything you could take exception to. It was just the way he looked at you—with red bitterness in his eyes—and it made her feel uncomfortable to be near him.

After Harold, there came Edgar and her own especial favourite of Jack’s children, the wondrously dreamy Eleanor, so pale and ethereal and fragile that Mary had kept her at home far longer than was normal, stopping Jack from letting her go into service, claiming she was needed at home.

This was only partly true. Mary always needed the extra pair of hands around the house, but it was more than that. Eleanor was … what was the word? Simple? Not in the sense of stupid, but innocent, naive, untainted by the world, as trusting as a lamb amongst wolves. Mary felt that Eleanor would bruise too easily if left to fend for herself … bruise inside where the hurt was always so much the greater.

There had been three other bairns: John, Jack’s first born, Edward and Sophie, but all had died in infancy. Losing those three children had been too much for Jack’s sickly first wife, also called Mary. She had simply been worn out and had died giving birth to Eleanor.

Mary always wondered if something had happened during the childbirth that had left Eleanor the way she was; perhaps the cord had got wrapped around her neck, starving her of oxygen. They said that that could cause simple-mindedness, but there again, Eleanor wasn't simple-minded exactly.

At least, not in the way you thought of simple-minded children, not like Jimmy Poskit from Alice Street, twisted and garbled, forever touching and playing with himself, leering at you as he did so, a bit like Harold, only more so. And come to think of it, Jimmy wasn't the only Poskit boy who was a bit feeble-minded, a bit peculiar. Sammy Poskit, who was married to Ethel Whittaker as was and lived on Whitton Lane, he was a few lumps short of a full coal scuttle as well.

Then, there were her own children, Nicholas, the apple of her eye, who had won a scholarship to the grammar school and would never ever have to work underground like his father or brothers and for that blessing alone Mary gave Thanks every night.

And lastly there were the twins, Isaac and Saul, 13 years old now, and up to every conceivable bit of mischief imaginable. Their father had taken his belt to them on more than one occasion and would no doubt do so again, but nothing seemed to have much effect. They would take their beatings, dry their tears and, within minutes, be up to their tricks again, as artful as a barrow-load of monkeys.

Still, Mary thought, ‘I would rather have them as they are, safe and above ground, than going down the pit, but soon, too soon, they would be 14 years old, no longer boys.’ Unless she could find some way out of it; down the mines they would go. The prospect filled her with dread that clogged up her heart. Often, all too often, there were deadly collapses, gas explosions or flooding. The pit was always hungry for men; it devoured men with ferocity that was almost Satanic. Too many men had been maimed and killed for any mother to be sanguine about her children working in the mines.

Mary nodded off again for a minute or two, and then she woke with a start of disorientation. She had felt herself about to slip into a deep pit, a dream she had had over and over recently, and it terrified her, believing that it portended a great disaster, and to a miner’s wife that could only mean a collapse or explosion underground.

She shuddered in trepidation. ‘Someone walking over my grave,' she whispered fearfully and pulled her shawl tighter about herself. She was cold as well, even in the height of summer; those dead chill hours before dawn could be frigidly bitter.

Mary stretched to ease the knots on the muscles of her neck and back. Yesterday had been washday, the most tiring of all days, hours spent hunched over the washtub, as sheets and linen and thick black coal encrusted pit clothes were scrubbed and battered on the washboard, boiled and beaten with the poss stick, rinsed in the rinse tub, twisted and mangled damp-dry, the kitchen filled with a dense, almost gelatinous fog compounded of sweaty clothes and steam and soap fumes, a sour-sweet brume that caught in the throat and stung the eyes.

Line after line of washing had crisscrossed the back street, the whole street bedecked with washday bunting like a fleet of galleons at full sail. Then, it had rained, so all the clothes had to be swiftly dragged off the lines and brought in to join the piles of still damp and wet clothing waiting to go out on the line. The skies cleared up and, with Eleanor’s help, they had strung out the laundry once more, only for the coal cart to come around, so back inside went the still wet washing, to join the ever-growing pile again.

She thought she would never get any of it dry and, in fact, there was still a load drying on the clothes horse in front of the range; the boys’ school shirts and underwear hung over the brass rail under the mantle shelf and yet more hung on the drying rack suspended on pulleys from the ceiling, a gallows liberally strewn with flannel shirts and grub-grey vests, long johns, short hogger trousers, neckerchiefs and wool stockings, dangling like executed criminals hanging from a gibbet.

By the time she had got all the washing hanging somewhere to dry, there had been Jack’s dinner to fix when he came back from the 'Green Tree' and then, later, Edgar’s dinner and breaktime sandwiches to fix before he went on night shift.

Harold had come in from afternoon shift at ten and needed his bath and dinner, there was ironing to do, and it had been well after midnight by the time she had finished, bone weary, back aching, hands with the dead white skin of a drowned corpse, eyes bleary and smarting, wanting nothing more than to fall into her bed and sleep for a week.

But she could not, Jack was on morning shift, starting at four and she would have to be up and about by three o'clock to get his breakfast ready and prepare his bait, the sandwiches for his break. They were always strawberry jam sandwiches, sticky jam to lubricate the back of a throat made as raw as a harsh file by the coal dust.

She squinted up at the clock nestling between a forest of brass candlesticks on the mantle-shelf, peering through the nightgloom, trying to read the time, but could not and had to get up from her chair to hold the clock close to her face. 'Ten to three,' she said to herself. 'Well, I'm up now and may as well stay up.'

And feeling her bladder suddenly full, she padded across the backyard to the privy, wrinkling her nose as ever at the smell. No matter how often she scrubbed it, no matter how much carbolic was used, she could never get rid of the smell, the smell of stale urine and fetid dankness that seemed permeated into the very fabric of the whitewashed walls.

As she hoisted her skirts, the cold air on her bare legs and thighs sent a shiver through her body, rattling the bones inside her goose-pimpled flesh.

The night air was still, as if buried under a quilt of silence, an eerie silence; even the sound of her urine tinkling into the bowl seemed deadened, mute, and Mary shuddered again, portents of disaster casting icy fingers up her spine.

‘Somebody else walking on my grave,' she said aloud, needing the sound of her own voice to break the spell of heavy, woven silence.

Back indoors again, she warmed herself over the dampened down coals in the range, washed her hands in the stone sink and swiftly made up Jack’s sandwiches before going into the front room to wake him.

The big four-poster bed seemed to fill the whole room, and she looked longingly at it again, feeling her eyelids weighting down from just thinking about sleep. She might catch an hour or so in the rocking chair after Jack had gone, but Edgar was on night shift and would be home at six, ready for his bath and breakfast.

Harold was on two o'clock shift, the boys Isaac and Saul had to be got off to school, and Nicholas to the Grammar; she would have some time to bake and prepare dinner, by which time Jack would be home again.

Jack was a small compact man, as strong and wiry as a bull terrier, and he seemed lost in the big four-poster bed, like a baby curled up in the corner of a cot. He was snoring lightly and, as she looked down on him, Mary felt a surge of affection for him run through her like static electricity. He had been a good man to her, better than she deserved, a good husband and provider who had been there for her when she had needed someone—desperately needed someone.

Life with Jack had been hard, would remain hard, there was no denying that, but the lot of any miner’s wife was hard, but when he had a good cavil, a good thick seam to work at; money was adequate, he didn't beat her as some men beat their wives, and he was not much taken for the drink. A pint or two at the 'Green Tree' to wash down the dust, but that was all, and who would deny him that?

Reaching over, she shook him by the shoulder. ‘Jack. Jack. It’s time.’

‘Uhhh? What?’

‘Time, Jack. Time!’

She could see him struggling to wake, coming up through the layers of sleep, coming up from the depths as if coming up from underground in the mine cages. He yawned and stretched and coughed and sneezed and farted, all at the same time, and then rubbed at his eyes before swinging out his legs from under the covers and sitting up straight.

‘Aye, right then Mary. Be with you in a minute,’ he said as he stretched again. ‘You get us me breakfast on, though I doubt you've a deal left.’

‘Bread. There’s always bread, you know that. And I’ve still got a bitty bacon rind and fat. I can fry it up with your bread. And you've got jam for your bait.’

‘That'll do grand, Mary. And choose us the book, will you?’

‘Owt special, pet? I'll put it by your plate?’

‘Nay, you choose. Right, best be getting on I suppose, else Billy Bedlam will be here, and the day has yet to come when I'm still in my bed when Billy comes by.’

Even as he spoke, they could hear a cry at the head of the street, ‘LAD AWAAAY. UP. UP. LAD AWAAAY. GET UUUP, GET UUUP. UP, UP,’ as Billy Belledame, better known as Billy Bedlam, the caller, came down to rouse those men on early shift.

Mary put on the bacon rind and bread to fry together, glad she had been able to eke out that last piece of flitch. The miners had been on strike, coming out in sympathy with the building workers, and although the Union had sent a delegate to the Institute to explain it to the men, and Jack had tried to explain it to her, Mary could not understand, refused to understand, why she should have to put her family on short measures out of sympathy for the building workers. Times were hard enough when Jack and the elder boys were working, let alone when they were on strike.

Two weeks they had been out and even now they had gone back, had been back for 10 day,s there was no money in the house. They would still not get paid until Saturday, which meant four weeks without a penny coming in. And for what? Going on strike to improve your own lot, that she could understand, striking to get a better rate for the coal produced, since the men at the face were paid 'by the weight of mineral gotten' as the Act put it, that she could understand, but to strike, to make her children go hungry merely to help some unknown building workers in another part of the country? That she could not accept, and it still made her angry to think about it.

She poured a big mug of tea, set his fried bread and bacon on a plate, leaving it by the hob to keep warm, and crossed over to the wooden bookshelf on the opposite wall. Jack liked to read for 10 -15 minutes before going to work. ‘Sets me at ease,' he had told her. 'Gives me something to think about, some'at to mull over in my mind when I'm at the face. Why, you'd go daft else, nothing to take your head up with, nothing to think on except the hewing.'

He had a full set of Dickens, green morocco leather-bound, gold-embossed, that he had found in a bookseller in Durham. They had not been new when he had bought them, years and years ago, not even secondhand, third- or fourth-hand maybe, but they were his pride and the day would not go past that he did not read from them. He liked for Mary to pick a volume at random and lay it by his place and he would open it at any page and read for a while.

Mary did not think he had ever read a book the whole way through, but that did not matter to him. The three or four pages he read before his shift would last him the whole day as he turned over the phrases and characters in his head; in his mind’s eye he could see Little Nell or Mr Bumble the Beadle, Pickwick or Micawber, Jacob Marley, Wackford Squeers, or Bill Sykes, and with them in his mind to keep him company, the hours underground hacking at the coalface soon sped past.

Mary didn't even look at the titles as she reached up and took the first book that came to hand and laid by his place, next to his mug of tea.

Jack came back from the privy, his braces dangling from his waist, washed his hands and splashed water into his face, and sat down as Mary laid his breakfast in front of him. He opened the book where it would and began to read, tracing the words with the forefinger of his left hand, mug of tea held by the other, munching his bread to the rhythm of his reading.

‘Is there more tea, Mary?’ he asked shortly.

As she bent over to fill his mug, the close written words of the pages seemed to leap out at her, and she almost dropped the tea pot in shock. ‘Something will come of this,' she read. 'I hope it may'nt be human gore.' And the horrible premonitions she had earlier, swept over her once more, like a tidal wave of ice, shudders of panic clattering at her heart.

‘Which, which one is that, Jack?’

He put his finger in the pages to mark his place and folded the book over to read the spine. ‘Barnaby Rudge. Why, you want to read it? Here, take it now, time I was off, anyhow.’

‘No, I just wondered, that’s all.’ She hesitated, wanting to hold him tight to her, to feel his strength and for him to tell her she was being foolish, but she could not. ‘Take care Jack,’ was all she could say as she walked with him to the back gate. No miner’s wife would ever let her man go without seeing him off, no miner’s mother would ever fail to see her sons to the gate, as the possibility that it might be the last time they ever saw them was all too real.

Mary, the black wings of her premonition hovering over her like a monstrous bat, tried to blink away her tears; she could not let Jack see her like this, she could not disgrace him front of his workmates, and especially she could not disgrace him in front of Nellie Spearman, who lived next door. She had a nose for gossip like a rabid bloodhound and would be certain to make something out of the sight of Mary crying at the gate. What Nellie didn't know, she would guess at, well, invent would be a better word and in next to no time, all manner of stories would by flying round the village, sped on their way and nourished by the spite of Nellie’s vindictive tongue.

‘Morning Nellie, morning Charlie,’ she managed to say with a smile, the words like choking feathers in her throat. ‘Ta-ra then pet,’ she said to Jack, laying her hand on his arm, desperate for a (final?) touch on him.

‘Aye, be seeing thee, lass. And tell Isaac and Saul, if I hear they’ve been in trouble again, they'll be feeling me belt to their arses. Soonest they get working down the pit, the better, where I can keep an eye on 'em, the young buggers … they'll have no time for their tricks then.’

Jack pulled on his flat cap, tugged at the peak to settle it squarely on his head, and fell into step with Jim Comby and Charlie Spearman, the sound of their hob-nailed boots ringing off the cobbles and echoing around the morning damp walls of the back passage.

Mary watched him for as long as she could without inciting comment from Nellie Spearman and then hurried back indoors to kneel by the side of the bed, praying for Jack to be kept safe, unable to rid herself of the hard knot of tension that weighed on her stomach and heart like a ball of iron.

She was so tired that not even the hard clogging weight of apprehension could stop her from nodding off and as she dozed in her chair, waiting for Edgar to come in from night shift, something Billy Bedlam had said a few days ago coming to mind. Billy had claimed that war was coming, said he could smell war in the air. He had said it even before that Grand Duke Ferdinand had been assassinated on June 28th, nearly two weeks ago, shot in some place that nobody had ever heard of, somewhere across the other side of Europe, but then everyone knew that Billy was touched, had been for years.

Mary hoped that it would not come to a war. She had a brother, Norman Blackett, an infantryman in the Royal Durham Regiment. She could hardly remember Norman, Mary was seven years old when he had run away from home at the age of 13, choosing, like so many boys, the apparent glamour of the Army to the rigours and danger of life underground. Even when he was home on leave, she barely saw him.

Even though he lived a mere 16 miles away, at Mangdon Heath on the other side of Durham with his wife Olive when not in Barracks, she doubted if she would recognise him if he were to walk through the door that very minute. Even so, blood was blood, thicker than water and war could mean he might have to go and fight, and so she added a little prayer for Norman as well.

But the idea of a war involving England was nonsense anyway. Who on earth cared what happened to some Grand Duke or other? It made no sense, no sense at all, to say that war would reach England, even if a few Serbs and Austrians and Hungarians did get to fighting in the Balkans or Bosnia, or wherever. How could that possibly affect us?

No, Billy Bedlam was touched and that was the end of it.

Billy Bedlam’s name was obviously a corruption of his surname, Belledame, (which he claimed was French and swore that his ancestors were aristocrats fleeing from the French Revolution and the guillotine, but why the offspring of French aristocracy came to be Durham miners was something Billy had never been able to satisfactorily explain). Some said he was called Bedlam because of the noise he made when calling the shifts, others said it was because he belonged in Bedlam, an asylum for the mentally insane (Bedlam, in itself, a corruption of Bethlehem).

Whatever the case, no-one disputed that Billy had never been the same since there had been a collapse of the north-east boards back in 1894. Billy had been working as a putter then, moving full and empty tubs up and down the roadways of the mine. Hearing the rumbles and the screams as the tunnels began collapsing behind him, he had scrambled headfirst into a small side passage, and screamed and screamed in helpless terror as the roof caved in around him, entombing him as the coal dust wrapped around his face, clogging up his eyes and nose and throat. He thought he would die of suffocation and screamed again, wishing he had not been so stupid as to dive into the passage; at least, if he had been crushed, it would have been quick and painless, not this, not to be slowly suffocated in coal dust as his air ran out.

The collapse could not have been total, or else there was a bigger air pocket than he realised because Billy Belledame was dug out alive 27 hours later, almost crazed with thirst, his throat a raw mass of emery-papered flesh from screaming and the dust.

He did not speak for nearly a month, and then only in a whisper. His hair had turned as white as the snow on the high valley sides in January, and when he walked in through his door, his wife thought him a ghost and screamed and fainted. He never went underground again, could not even bear to go near the steel stairway that led to the cages at the pit head.

It was thought that Billy’s vocal cords had been ruined forever and it had been Abel Poskit’s perverted idea of a joke to suggest to the Under Manager that Billy be given a job as caller.

When he heard of this, Billy had just smiled, taken a deep breath and yelled out, ‘You bugger you, Abel Poskit,’ in a voice fit to wake the dead. He grinned again and said simply, ‘I knew the bugger were there somewhere, just didn't know where to find him.’

Billy had been a caller ever since, but even though he'd found his voice again, no-one doubted but that he'd left his wits in the dust underground, for who but a fool can claim to smell war in the air?

TWO

Gone off the same night, following the drum.

As Jack Garforth and the other miners walked across to the pitheads to start their morning shift, Jeb Fulcher eased open the warped back door to his tied farm cottage and slipped out into the dark pre-dawn stillness, a stillness that wrapped itself around the row of mangey labourers’ hovels of Highfield Farm like a cold wet cloth.

As the name might suggest, Highfield Farm stood high on the south, facing slopes of the valley and was still buried in deep shadow as Jeb climbed over the dry stone wall at the corner of the houses and dropped down into the fields, and skirted past the herd of Shorthorn cattle that were the pride of Highfield. Jeb sometimes fancied that Hector Whitehead, the owner of Highfield, thought more of his Shorthorns than he did of his wife and children—certainly he spent more time with them and seemed to take more care of them, forever checking on them and writing up all the details in his stock book.

Scurrying crabwise downhill towards the copse at the base of the valley, Jeb hunched over like a mole-skinned Quasimodo in the hope that this would make him less visible.

Jeb Fulcher was a stout, stunted man with disproportionately long arms and the gnarled appearance and complexion of an ancient olive tree. Clumps of mousey hair grew on the top and sides of his head like clots of marsh grass in a swamp, and the most prominent aspect of his face was a great hooked nose, standing out from the blandness of his face like a granite outcrop on a sandy plain. He thought this nose to be a noble ornament, Romanesque, patrician even, the distinguishing feature of an imposing visage, whereas everyone else simply thought that he had a big conk and called him Nebbie Jeb or Jeb the Neb behind his back.

Jeb the Neb crossed over seven more fields, eight more walls, so that by the time he reached the copse, he had left Highfield property and was onto Exham lands. As always, he felt a little grim smile of satisfaction creeping across his face; Jeb loved to poach from His Lordship, even though it would mean a heavy fine or even prison if he were ever caught. He had nothing against His Lordship, it was simply that his elder brother Samuel, miserable old bastard that he was, was Lord Exham’s head gamekeeper and Jeb was always eager to get one over on him. Jeb and Samuel had never got on, even as children, and even though they still lived barely four miles apart, they hardly ever saw each other and could barely speak civilly to each other when they did.

There had always been trouble between them; they had been forever scrapping in bloody-nosed scuffles over nothing, nothing that is except the fact they did not like each other, had never liked each other, and never would like each other. Blood might be thicker than water, but in their case, the fratricidal gore was curdled—thick-sour and rancid.

Samuel had left Highfield Farm at 14 to go and work for Lord Exham as an apprentice gamekeeper and, ever since, Jeb had taken perverse pride in poaching on Exham land, poaching from right under his brother’s nose, setting wire snares along the rabbit runs, lifting a pheasant or two from here and there, and always taking grouse from the high moors beyond the dale before the 12th July, the glorious twelfth when all the nobs came to stay with Lord Exham and shoot.

Jeb reached the edge of the copse, and stood very still for a good five minutes, listening for alien sounds that might indicate gamekeepers, not that he expected there would be, Samuel had not caught onto him yet, but caution and sharp ears were the hallmarks of a good poacher and Jeb Fulcher was the best in the valley.

'Aye, no doubt bugger Sam’s still ploughing that scrawny chicken-necked bitch of a missus of his, else snoring his big gob off,' Jeb said sourly to himself and, satisfied at last, eased himself silently into the copse, moving as smoothly as a shadow over polished marble, and checked out his snares.

The snares were loops of wire tied to a peg, driven into the ground, and strategically placed along the rabbit runs that crisscrossed the woods, inviting the bobtail beasts to garrotte themselves as they scampered along the dung-pellet strewn paths.

He was in luck, three of his seven snares had taken, a fat doe, pregnant by the feel of her belly, a long-legged leveret, which was a surprise; hares normally kept to the open fields but perhaps this youngster had been driven into the copse by a fox on the prowl. The third catch was an exhausted buck, which had somehow managed to ensnare himself by his back leg. Struggling to get free from the tightening wire noose, the big buck had all but flayed his leg down to the bone. Fur and matted blood were liberally spread around in a circle about the snare.

‘Lucky all that thrashing about and the smell of blood didn’t bring that vixen in from Bottom Hollow to see him off,' Jeb thought as he snapped the rabbit’s neck with a crunch that seemed to echo deafeningly loud around the thick murky strakes and tree trunks of the copse.

Well pleased with himself, Jeb gathered up all his snares, stuffed the catch into the deep poacher’s pocket of his coat, and hurried back up to Highfield as the dawn light spilled more brightly across the fields.

He was later than usual this morning; normally he was back indoors well before the dawn crept over the valley crown, but he had slept until well past four. Too much cowslip wine last night had befuddled his internal clock, but he had dared not leave his snares in place. ‘Even blind-bugger Sam couldn't miss them,' he thought as he slipped back through the door of the cottage, still fairly certain that he had not been spotted.

Jeb, the second son of Thomas and Millie Fulcher, had lived in the tied cottage at Highfield Farm all his life, and never envisaged anything other than dying there. His father, Thomas, had been taken on by Hector Whitehead’s grandfather as a 14-year-old and he had lived there all the remainder of his life, taking Millie Winslop as his wife in 1878 and raising seven children in the cottage, all on 8s a week, farmworkers wages being reduced from 11s in 1889.

The cottage had been all but empty of furniture back then and remained so now. The living room floor was still scrubbed brick, although Jeb was less fastidious about scrubbing it than his mother had ever been. The same peg rug, made from scraps of old cloth pegged onto sacking that his mother had brought with her as a dowry, still lay on the floor, although it would have defied anybody’s powers of description and imagination to say what colours it had originally been.

There was a broken legged table propped by a piece of wood, a single hard chair where his father had sat to eat whilst everyone else squatted on the floor as best they could. To this ensemble, Jeb had added an old wooden rocking chair that had been thrown out of the cottage two doors down when old Martin Handyside had died.

Off to one side of the living room was a larder with four or five rude wooden shelves, the shelves never contained much more than a stale loaf of bread, a packet of tea, crinkle-skinned apples, potatoes, swedes and, if he had been lucky with his snares, a rabbit or two.

The cottage had no water, no gas, no sewers, and if it rained heavily and the wind blew from the north, not much of a roof either.

Through to the back of the cottage there were two bedrooms, one in which the children had slept and one where his parents and the youngest baby had slept, and even now Jeb still slept in that same bed he once had shared with his siblings. The bed his mother and father had used was still in the other room, a room that Jeb had only been in but once or twice since his mother had died there in 1911, his father having died the winter before.

The third son, Jubal, had been a soldier in South Africa, enlisting in 1897 when a recruiting Sergeant had passed through by Bishops Shilton on a recruiting drive. Jubal had taken some cattle to market there for old Mr Whitehead and had signed on immediately, arranged for the money from the sale of the cattle to be sent to Highfield, and had gone off the same night, following the drum. He came home only the once afterwards, in 1900, just before shipping out to South Africa.

He had caught a ride from the station on the milk-cart and walked through the door, resplendent in a bright scarlet coat, just as if he were returning from Bishops Shilton market that same day, instead of three years later. His mother had kissed him on the cheek, but his father looked up once, grunted, ‘How do, Jubal? Is't cold out?’ and carried on laboriously reading his newspaper.

A few days later Jubal left to re-join his Regiment and ship out to the Cape. His mother and sisters had watched him walk away, watching him all the way until he was out of sight at the bottom of the hill. Jubal survived all through the Boer War, but then caught a fever. Jeb never could remember exactly which fever it had been, ent-errick or ant-eric, something like that, which Jeb presumed was some form of exotic disease caught from African ants, and he died in 1902.

Jacob, the youngest boy had worked alongside Jeb in the fields, starting in 1890 as an 11-year-old boy, earning half a crown a week for 70 hours labour, Jeb, bigger and six years older, was earning 4s 6d, but then he had to work on Sundays as well.

One day in 1902, when Jacob was 23, he had an argument with Hector Whitehead about not being paid when laid off because of bad weather. He tossed his spade aside. ‘Bugger this for a fucking lark,’ he said and walked off. The next anyone heard from him was in 1909, when he wrote a five-line letter from India to say he was in the Army with the Norfolk Regiment. How he ever got into the Norfolk’s his letter did not explain.

All three of Jeb’s sisters had married and left home and so, when his mother and father died, he remained alone in the cottage, and even though it was intended to be a family dwelling Mr Hector allowed Jeb to stay there as a gesture for all the hard work he and his father had done over the years … at least until another farmhand with a wife and family came along.

Jeb hung up his catch in the larder, munched a piece of stale bread, after first breaking off the mouldy bits, and then swilled out his mouth with cold water from an earthenware jug before setting out for his day’s labour in the fields.

THREE

Gnawed at his vitals like a rat at a granary door.

Just as Mary nodded off again in her rocking chair, hoping to catch a few minutes quiet nap, the back gate clattered on its hinges and the weary scrape of hob-nailed boots echoed across the yard and splintered the sharp silence of her sleep like a broken mirror.

‘Morning Mam’, Edgar Garforth said as he clumped in from night shift and hung up his cap on the back of the door. ‘Is me bath ready?’ he asked and turned away to unlace his boots, thinking how tired she looked, but then she always looked tired, and he gave no further thought just how drawn and exhausted Mary really was.

‘It'll not be but a minute, pet. Bring us in the tub. Some water’s already hot and I'll put some more on an' all.’

Wearily, she dragged herself up, holding her aching back, her knees creaking in protest, but glad of something to do to take her black-cloaked mind off her worry about Jack.

Edgar brought in the tin bath from the backyard, where it had been hanging up on a nail on the side wall by the privy and set it in front of the fire. Mary poured the hot water from the pans on the stove and set more pans of water on the stove to heat up. When the bath was ready, she draped blankets over cords hanging from the ceiling to screen Edgar off as he bathed.

After he had bathed, and finished his breakfast, Edgar slowly climbed up the steep narrow stairs to the front bedroom. He kicked the twins, Isaac and Saul, out of the double bed; they would have to get up soon for school anyway. Harold was lying diagonally across most of the bed and Edgar unceremoniously pushed him over to make room.

‘Watch what tha's bloody doing, buggerlugs, else tha'll get a clip round your ear'ole,’ Harold grumbled, still half asleep, supposing that it was either Isaac or Saul who had shoved him.

‘Who're thee calling buggerlugs?’

‘Oh, it’s thee, is it Edgar? Still, who does tha think you’re pushing?’

‘Get yourself over, Harold. Man comes in from his shift, he wants to get some kip, not bugger about with thee trying to find room.’

‘You’ve got stacks of room, man,’ Harold grumbled in a whiney voice, but he moved over anyway as Edgar, in clean long johns and vest, climbed into the bed, ancient springs creaking in protest, and settled down to sleep on the lumpy horsehair mattress.