‘Well, I won’t tell Mama,’ said Rosie. ‘You can tell her. Or she can find out on her own. Tell Papa first.’
‘I suppose you know what the soldiers call us?’
Rosie laughed. ‘The Very Adorable Darlings.’
‘Have you looked at the rules? They do everything they can to make sure we can’t have any fun. That must be the reason our uniforms are held together by dozens of pins.’
‘How can you talk of fun?’ demanded Rosie. ‘There’s no fun any more. It’s wrong.’
‘I am going to have fun,’ said Ottilie. ‘I don’t have your principles. You know, you are a bit of a puritan, Rosie.’
‘It’s the way I am,’ said Rosie.
‘Has Christabel told you what she’s going to do?’
‘No. Is she going to do something?’
‘She wants to join the Snapshot League.’
‘How perfectly wonderful! She hasn’t got a camera, though.’
‘She’s just ordered one. She can even develop the film in the attic.’
‘Mama isn’t going to like her going to strange people’s houses in all sorts of horrid places.’
‘You know Mama. She’s actually quite a sport, underneath. She says the first thing that comes into her head, which is usually quite shockingly crass, and then arrives at something more thoughtful later.’
‘Sophie’s already started to knit a pair of mittens,’ said Rosie, ‘with an elephant embroidered on the back.’
The following morning, whilst they were eating their smoked haddock and poached egg at breakfast, Mrs McCosh announced her intention to contribute to the war effort by having Belgian ladies to tea, and taking fruit to the Cottage Hospital. In the wake of this portentous news, Millicent came in with a letter for Rosie. She took it, and instantly knew the handwriting. She let out a small cry and began tearing at the envelope with trembling hands. The others watched her, their forks suspended midway to their mouths.
Rosie read the letter, turned it over and read it again.
‘My darling Rosie and dearest Pal,
Well, old thing, it looks as though I have bought a blue ticket home, having been here for just a couple of months…
She scanned and rescanned the phrases ‘…I seem to have come through relatively intact…Get someone to read the banns, I’m coming home…Your best friend and best husband-to-be…’
She jumped up, crying, ‘He’s alive! He’s alive! He’s coming home! He’s only been wounded! He isn’t dead! He isn’t dead!’ She began to laugh, but it was laughter that was strangely horrible and hysterical.
Hamilton McCosh reached out and took the letter from her. He looked at it briefly and handed it back. ‘Look at the date on it, Rosie bairn,’ he said softly. ‘The telegram about the death was several days later than this.’
Rosie stared at him for a moment, and quite suddenly sat down and fell silent. Her father put his hand on hers, and eventually she looked up and announced angrily, ‘He said he would come back, even if he was dead.’
She threw her napkin on the table and ran from the room. Upstairs in her bedroom she went down on her knees and groped frantically under the bed. She pulled out her plaster madonna and child, unwrapped it, sat on her bed and hugged it to her chest, rocking and keening.
Downstairs, Sophie said, ‘Do you think perhaps that one of us should go to her?’ and Hamilton McCosh said, ‘I’ll go. I’ll give it half an hour, and then I’ll go.’
‘That’s very good of you, dear,’ said his wife, who had been hoping to be spared.
Upstairs, Rosie was startled by a knock on the door. ‘Don’t come in!’ she cried, and Millicent’s voice came back: ‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea, miss. I’ll leave it on the table on the landing.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rosie, choked a little further by this unsolicited act of kindness. She heard the voice of Ash, saying, ‘Even if I am dead I will come back, I’ll find a way to be with you.’ For the very briefest moment, she thought she caught the manly scent of his cologne.
‘Ash?’ she said, looking up, but then she shook her head and sighed. She stared into the face of her plaster madonna, and then into the eyes of the somewhat adult-looking baby Jesus. She put the statuette down, and bowed her head.
30
The Volunteer
1
The Grampians
To His Grace, the Duke of Devonshire
15 March 1915
Your Grace,
I am writing to you because I understand that you have given over the ground floor of Devonshire House to the Red Cross, and am therefore hoping that you will be able to pass on this letter to the relevant authority.
I am seeking war work and am hoping that you may be able to assist me. I have no nursing qualifications, but feel that I may be of considerable use as a nursing assistant of some sort. I have set my heart on becoming a VAD. I am good with people who are suffering, I am prepared to work hard, and it is too much to bear having to stay at home at a time like this and not do anything important. My fiancé was killed in February, and you will understand that I feel I have a personal obligation to him to pull my weight, as he did, and to alleviate the sufferings of those who are suffering as he did.
I am not married, have no children, am of good reputation, and of the Anglican faith. I have the permission of my father to volunteer.
I am also writing to St John’s Ambulance Association at Clerkenwell, to the War Office and to the International Council of Nurses in Oxford Street, in the hope of maximising my opportunities.
Thank you, Your Grace, and forgive me if I have not employed the correct terms of address. At the time of writing my mother is staying with friends in Bromley, and she is our expert on matters of form.
Yours respectfully,
Miss Rosemary McCosh
2
Devonshire House
18 March 1915
Dear Miss McCosh,
Thank you for your letter, which I have had the pleasure of passing on to the Red Cross.
I wish you the very best of luck, and every success in your patriotic and compassionate quest.
I remain yours etc.
Devonshire
31
Relics
There was a violent knocking at the door, and when Millicent answered it she saw, standing in the porch in a state of considerable distress, the young maid from the Pendennis house next door.
‘Is Miss Rosie in?’ asked the maid. ‘I’m all alone with the mistress, and she’s carrying on something terrible. Can you get Miss Rosie?’
Accordingly, Rosie found herself in the Pendennis dining room, where Mrs Pendennis had plumped herself down on one of the chairs and was weeping inconsolably. There was an abominable smell in the room, and on the dining table was a package whose brown paper, sealing wax and string had been opened carefully to reveal its contents.
Mrs Pendennis gestured towards the table and then continued to weep with her hands over her eyes. Rosie approached and took up the objects, one by one.
They were: Ash’s fob watch, the one that had been given to him by his father on his twenty-first birthday; a bundle of Rosie’s letters, tied up with string; another bundle of letters, from friends and family, also tied up with string; a Parker pen, with gold nib, a gift from his mother at Christmas; a water-stained notebook which had served as a diary, full of his writing, in pencil, which was beautifully neat at the beginning, and almost illegible by the end; a creased brown leather wallet embossed at one corner with ‘AHP’, containing a ten-shilling note, a ticket stub, and the handwritten words to ‘Gilbert the Filbert’ on lined paper, folded into four; The Man of Property by Galsworthy, in terrible condition, warped by damp and smeared with yellow mud, a tram ticket at this page serving as a bookmark; an unopened packet of Craven ‘A’ cigarettes, presumably for use as currency. There was a string of beads from a Christmas cracker, and a lock of Rosie’s hair in a Three Nuns tobacco tin. There was a squashed bullet, and an extraordinary souvenir i
n the form of two bullets which had intersected in flight, making a perfect St Andrew’s cross. All of these things seemed to radiate Ash’s personality, as if he were present in what he had left behind.
Then there were the components of his uniform, much of it at first unrecognisable because of the mud and blood. His cap was torn across the top, as if ripped by barbed wire. There was a leather belt; his breeches had dark bloodstains where the balls of shrapnel had penetrated at the bottom right of his abdomen, and the tunic had the same holes and the same black patch of blood where it had hung over his breeches.
Everything was set solid in caked mud, a mud that was an unnatural shade of grey, and it was this mud that seemed to carry the stench that was so vile and overwhelming. Rosie tried not to breathe as she turned over the garments and looked at them, hoping to find some clues about Ash, something that she did not already know.
‘How could they do this?’ demanded Mrs Pendennis suddenly. ‘How can they be so cruel? Why couldn’t they wash them first?’
‘The smell isn’t Ash,’ said Rosie dully. ‘It’s the mud. The mud’s full of the smell of dead things. They’ve buried so many people that it’s got into the earth. The mud’s made of the dead.’
‘Take them away. Please, let’s burn them,’ said Mrs Pendennis. ‘I can’t bear to have them. Take them away. Please take them away.’
‘Mamma, can I keep the letters, my ones to Ash?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. No one else should have them.’ Rosie bent down and kissed Mrs Pendennis on the cheek. ‘Thank you, my dear, you’re a great comfort,’ she said. ‘Will you burn the uniform?’
Rosie nodded, because she did not want to lie out loud.
‘Have you heard from Albert and Sidney?’ she asked.
‘Yes, they seem to be safe at the moment,’ said their mother, and left it at that.
Rosie carefully packed the foul garments back into the brown paper, and went and put the package just outside the front door, in the porch, so that the stench in the house could begin to dissipate. She returned to find that Mrs Pendennis had moved to the drawing room, and so she sat next to her on the sofa, putting her arm around her shoulder. Mrs Pendennis began to sob again, and then wiped her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s when somebody’s nice about it that I can’t help but cry. Yesterday it was the milkman, and the day before that it was the costermonger.’
‘Oh, Mamma,’ said Rosie, ‘I’m just the same. It’s the sympathy that’s hard to take sometimes.’
‘I haven’t got any daughters,’ said Mrs Pendennis, turning to smile weakly. Her face was shining with tears. ‘I was hoping so much…’
Rosie kissed her on the forehead. ‘Oh, Mamma, Ash was my husband even if we weren’t married yet, and you’ve got a daughter as long as I’m alive. Really you’ve got four daughters. We’ve all been one big family since we were little, and there’s always been the blue door.’
‘Oh, the blue door. Thank God for the blue door. Hasn’t it been a lovely thing? We were so lucky, weren’t we? But it’s you who’s always been the real daughter. I mean the best daughter, out of you four.’
‘I’ve always thought,’ said Rosie, ‘how nice it would have been if Albert and Sidney could have taken a fancy to Christabel and Sophie. Or Ottie.’
‘Nothing is ever so neat, my dear.’
‘The blue door has overgrown with brambles since the gardeners left. Have you noticed? It reminds me of that Light of the World picture, somehow. Maybe it’s the thorns on Christ’s head. I’m going to get some secateurs and open it up again.’
‘It seems so long ago, doesn’t it? When you were all children. Do you remember little Daniel Pitt vaulting over the wall, and running about pretending to be an aeroplane, spreading his wings out and roaring? And then one did fly over, and Bouncer went absolutely bonkers with barking at it.’ She inclined her head and looked up. ‘Do you know something, my dear? I’ve been thinking, now that Ash has gone, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you and Daniel were to…you know…meet up again?’
‘Mamma! How could you?’
‘I can because I’m Ash’s mother. You and Daniel always got on so well, and he obviously adored you.’
‘Poor Archie adored me even worse,’ said Rosie drily, ‘and Ottilie adored Archie.’
‘Shall we look in Ash’s diary?’ suggested Mrs Pendennis. ‘Do you think that Ash would mind?’
‘I think he was probably writing it for us anyway. How are we going to read it without crying?’
‘Let’s take it in turns to read it aloud, one entry each. I’ll start.’
Rosie fetched the battered, mud-stained notebook from the side table and resumed her place at Mrs Pendennis’s side. She flicked through it. ‘It starts terribly smartly and ends up just a frightful scrawl.’
Huddled together on the sofa, Rosie and Mrs Pendennis spent the morning reading and rereading, often horrified, and just as often amused. ‘Fancy eating a huge meal of nothing but custard! And having to use other men’s love letters in the latrine!’
When they had read the last page, Mrs Pendennis sighed, got up and went to the window. She looked over to the blue door. ‘The thing is…’ she said. ‘The thing is, he died like that. I mean, it wasn’t in battle, it was just a shell that somebody fired for their own amusement. It’s not the way he would have wanted.’
‘I know, Mamma. I’ve had the same thought, but there’s hardly anyone who gets to die the way they want, is there? I’m sure that I won’t. I just want to ascend into Heaven like Jesus, or the Virgin. However I die, I’m quite certain it won’t be like that. With any luck I’ll just drop dead with a heart attack, but, you know, it can take weeks.’
‘What galls me, my dear, is I just can’t see the point of it. I do see the point of the war, of course I do, but that particular death…it didn’t help anyone in anyway at all, did it?’
‘It helped Ash. He went straight to Heaven without ever having to grow disillusioned, or sick and old. Whom the gods love die young. We all owe God a death. He who pays this year is quit for the next. It’s true, isn’t it? And Ash won’t have to grow old, like us.’
Mrs Pendennis turned and saw the enthusiasm in Rosie’s face. ‘My dear, I so much envy you your faith. It must be such a wonderful consolation. Perhaps he went straight to Heaven. I hope he did. I hope he watches over us and comforts us without us even knowing. But he went there without becoming a husband or a father or a grandfather, without really ever having made anything of himself. That reminds me, we’ve had a letter from someone called Major Phillips. I expect you’d like to see it. He says that Ash’s comrades called him “Yank” and that they loved him so much that they carried him to the clearing station under fire. I’ll go and fetch it. I think I left it in the hall.’
Mrs Pendennis returned with the letter, and she and Rosie settled down to read it. ‘It’s a lovely letter,’ said Rosie, her voice a little choked. ‘That bit about dulce et decorum est pro patria mori…how he was prepared to die for a country that wasn’t even his…and saying he was like Lord Byron, going off to sacrifice himself for Greece.’
Mrs Pendennis got up and went to the window, looking over towards the blue door. ‘Well, my dear, he did actually love this country. One can perfectly well be a patriot twice over. I’m certain that the Pitt boys must love France just as much as they love England, and your own father must love England just as much as he loves Scotland, or he wouldn’t have stayed here, would he? It wasn’t so long ago when half of England seemed to be in love with Germany.’
The two women looked out into the garden, remembering how the world had been, back in the days of the coronation, when Bouncer had broken up the party, and Daniel Pitt had vaulted over the wall.
32
The Clothes
The following morning, Rosie and Millicent emerged from the door of the kitchen carrying a large galvanised dolly tub between them, and they began to go in and out with jugs of water from the kettle on the range, filling it wi
th hot soapy water.
When Rosie unwrapped the clothes, Millicent stepped back and waved her hand in front of her face. ‘Cripes, miss,’ she complained. ‘That’s right niffy.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Rosie. ‘You really don’t have to help me. I know it’s horrid.’
‘I will help, miss.’
Rosie had a washing bat, and Millicent a three-legged dolly stick. With these they stirred the mixture until a kind of loathsome scum began to gather on the surface of the water. They poured the water down the drain outside the kitchen and began the process again. They washed the uniform three times before the scum began to clear. ‘Why don’t we get clean water and leave ’em to soak?’ suggested Millicent. ‘We can have another go tomorrow. We’re both all of a lather, in’t we?’
‘Just think,’ said Rosie, wiping the perspiration from her face with a handkerchief, ‘we used to have a permanent whitster to buck the clothes. How times have changed.’
‘Well, now we all have to do our bit, don’t we, miss? You didn’t used to know how to wash clothes at all, miss, and now you’re no different from anybody else.’
‘I think I prefer it like this,’ said Rosie. ‘The only thing worse than having too much to do is not having anything to do. I much prefer being busy.’
‘Me too, miss, but me and Cookie don’t half have to do a lot these days.’
The following morning the uniform was washed again, put through the mangle, and hung out on tenterhooks on a line inside the boiler room. Rosie was ashamed that she had broken her promise to burn it, and did not want Mrs Pendennis to see it drying on the line outside.
In the warmth of the boiler room the clothes dried out, and even acquired the pleasant aroma of coal. Rosie inspected them where they hung on the line, and stroked the fabric. She put a forefinger through a shrapnel hole and thought about how Ash must have crumpled and fallen. The bloodstains had not entirely gone, but now they seemed bearable. Later on, in the light of experience, she would understand more deeply how fabric carried into a wound could set up complications, and how the mud that was carried into a wound by that fabric was purulent and lethal because it was made of corpses.