Pat Barker - The Eye in the Door

One thing I have found out — from 10, you won’t know him — is the state of things in Etaples. That’s the big camp where they all get sent to train and he says he’s never seen anything like it. He says they treat the conscripts like shit. Men tied to posts for the least little thing with their arms above their heads. Doesn’t sound much, does it, but he says it’s agony. He says as sure as anything there’s going to be a blow up there. I hope so, I do hope so. A few officers shot by their own men, that’s all it’ll take, just the one little spark, and it’ll spread like wildfire. I know it will.

Haven’t heard anything from Mac. I try to keep busy, I’m running round like scalded cat half the time because I daren’t let myself think. The little ones are nice, though. Nobody’s got to them yet. I thought of a new nursery rhyme the other day.

Georgie Georgie, pudding and pie

Perhaps the girls’ll make him cry

Let’s keep our ringers crossed, eh?

You want to stock up on food, Mam. I know it’s difficult when you’ve got Tommy to feed, but if you get the chance put a few tins by. If it ever comes to coupons, conchies’ families’ll be at the back of the queue, if they get any at all.

Don’t worry about me, I’m all right. You think about yourself for a change,

Lots of love,

Hettie

P.S. If that bloody Mac doesn’t write soon I’ll bash his bloody head in.

Dear Ma,

Find the stuff you asked for enclosed. Tell your friend to follow the directions exactly . You will think me a softie I expect but I feel sorry for the dogs. If you get close enough to the poor brutes, I pity them. Dead in twenty seconds. Anyway, good luck. Reckon we’ll have peace by next Christmas? Here’s hoping,

Alf

P.S. Winnie says to say she came all right.

My darling Hettie,

You’ll be wondering why you haven’t heard sooner. Well, there’s been all hell let loose. Do you remember that lad with the hump on his back? Would insist on going in front of the tribunal instead of getting out of it on health grounds, which he certainly would have done. I’ve been trying to get him a passage to Ireland and eventually succeeded, but he was picked up just as he was getting on to the boat. The hump gave him away. We’d tried everything to hide it. Charlie suggested putting a dress on him and trying to make him look like a pregnant woman walking backwards, but I don’t know how you do that. Anyway, he’s back in Wandsworth, where they’re doing their best to flatten it for him no doubt. But it’s a nuisance because it means we have to lie low and that means everybody else has had their trips to the Emerald Isle postponed. It clogs the entire system up, and I lose patience, I’m afraid. I know individuals matter, but getting six or seven men across to Ireland isn’t going to stop the war. There’s only one way do that, and we both know what it is.

I’m staying with Charlie Greaves’s mother, DON’T WRITE. I know you know the address, but the trouble is you’re not the only one who knows it. All incoming post is opened . I don’t want you in this any deeper than you are already. And I’m not treating you like ‘the little woman’. There’s got to be people they don’t know about, otherwise there’s no safe houses, and no network to pass people on. Speaking of which, I sent a lad to your Mam just before Christmas. Did you happen to bump into him? I wondered afterwards if I’d done the right thing. Not that I’ve any doubts about him, he’s a good lad, keen as mustard, but he does get carried away. I don’t suppose it matters, but if you write to your Mam you might mention it, though I suppose he’ll have moved on by now. How is she, by the way? I wish we could get Tommy out of there. He’s not doing her any good at all.

I’m writing this in bed, which is a big brass one, masses of room, and bouncy. It’s tippling down outside and the wind’s blowing, and I’d give anything to have you in here with me. Soon .

All my love,

Mac

It seemed strange to Prior to be reading his friends’ private letters, though these had all — with the exception of Alf’s letter and its inconvenient mention of dogs — been read aloud at the Old Bailey. Even Hettie’s little nursery rhyme had boomed around No. 1 Court, as the Attorney-General argued it implied her involvement in the conspiracy. No, there was no privacy left in these letters; he was not violating anything that mattered. And yet, as the train thundered into a tunnel and the carriage filled with the acrid smell of smoke, Prior turned to face his doubled reflection in the window and thought he didn’t like himself very much. It was the last letter he minded: the gentleness of Mac’s love for Hettie exposed, first in open court and now again to him.

They’d found that letter in the pocket of Hettie’s skirt when they went to the school to arrest her.

Harry Prior was getting ready to go out. A clean shirt had been put to air on the clothes-horse in front of the fire, darkening and chilling the room. Billy Prior and his mother sat at the table, she with her apron on, he in shirt and braces, unable either to continue their interrupted conversation or to talk to Harry. He bent over the sink, lathering his face, blathering and spluttering, sticking his index fingers into his ears and waggling them. Then, after rinsing the soap off, he placed one forefinger over each nostril in turn and slung great gobs of green snot into the sink.

Prior, his elbow touching his mother’s side, felt her quiver fastidiously. He laced his fingers round the hot cup of tea and raised it to his lips, dipping his short nose delicately as he drank. How many times as a child had he watched this tense, unnecessary scene, sharing his mother’s disgust as he would have shared her fear of lightning. Now, as a man, in this over-familiar room — the tiles worn down by his footsteps, the table polished by his elbows — he thought he could see the conflict more even-handedly than he had seen it then. It takes a great deal of aggression to quiver fastidiously for twenty-eight years.

He thought, now, he could recognize his mother’s contribution to the shared tragedy. He saw how the wincing sensitivity of her response was actually feeding this brutal performance. He recalled her gentle, genteel, whining, reproachful voice going on and on, long after his father’s stumbling footsteps had jerked him into wakefulness; how he had sat on the stairs and strained to hear, until his muscles ached with the tension, waiting for her to say the one thing he would not be able to bear. And then the scuffle of running steps, a stifled cry, and he would be half way downstairs, listening to see if it was just a single slap, the back of his father’s hand sending his mother staggering against the wall, or whether it was one of the bad times. She never had the sense to shut up .

But then, he thought, his face shielded by the rim of his cup, one might equally say she had never been coward enough to refrain from speaking her mind for fear of the consequences. It would be very easy, under the pretext of ‘even-handedness’, to slip too far the other way and blame the violence in the home not on his brutality, but on her failure to manage it.

As a child, Prior remembered beating his clenched fist against the palm of the other hand, over and over again, saying, with every smack of flesh on flesh, PIG PIG PIG PIG. Obviously, his present attempt to understand his parents’ marriage was more mature, more adult, more perceptive, more sensitive, more insightful, more almost anything you cared to mention, than PIG PIG PIG PIG, but it didn’t content him, because it was also a lie: a way of claiming to be ‘above the battle’. And he was not above it: he was its product. He and she — elemental forces, almost devoid of personal characteristics — clawed each other in every cell of his body, and would do so until he died. ‘They fight and fight and never rest on the Marches of my breast,’ he thought, and I’m fucking fed up with it.