Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

Rosie raised her eyebrows in a manner that her mother rightly construed as insubordinate. ‘That was Ash’s best friend, and he came here to talk to me about Ash.’

‘Best friend? He isn’t even an officer!’

‘Mama! Ash wasn’t an officer! The HAC is a regiment of gentlemen rankers. None of his friends would have been officers. They must have thought he was a natural gentleman or they wouldn’t have taken him on. And Corporal Hutchinson’s not from Sheffield, he’s from Walthamstow.’

‘Gracious me!’ exclaimed Mrs McCosh. ‘This all just too bad for words. He’s not even from a place I’ve heard of!’

Rosie went to fetch her bonnet, and as she put it on she said, ‘Honestly, Mama, you’re enough to turn anyone into a raging socialist.’

‘How dare you? What a perfectly dreadful thing to say! And where are you going?’

‘To the church, Mama. Corporal Hutchinson returns to the front on Monday, so I am going to pray for him.’

‘I don’t like you wandering off on your own like this. It is quite uncalled for. A young lady doesn’t go out on her own. You should take one of your sisters. Who knows what might befall you? God listens just as well in your own bedroom, you know.’

‘I’ll be back in time for tea,’ said Rosie, ignoring her mother’s strictures. There would be other women in the church, and she liked to be with them, all of them either heartbroken or anxious. Praying together was better than praying alone, whether God listens or not. Mrs Ottway had lost one of her sons in Mesopotamia, killed when a horse had panicked and bolted with a limber. She might say the Lord’s Prayer with Mrs Ottway.

She had a choice. In the end she walked across the golf course to Holy Trinity, even though it was a bit further than St John’s. There was always the chance that her father might be playing a surreptitious round instead of attending to his work in London, and it would have amused them both if she had caught him out. Sometimes, too, one came across a lost ball in the rough, and he was always delighted to be presented with it. Once she had been walking past a rabbit hole when a ball had been suddenly ejected from it, an amusing little miracle, whose recollection had always made her smile.

I WAITED ’TIL Miss Rosie stopped praying before I knocked. I always knew when she was praying because she made these muttering sounds and you could just hear it if you put your ear to the door, and then you heard her wrapping that Virgin and putting it back under the bed.

I went in and said, ‘Pot of tea, Miss Rosie,’ and she said, ‘I didn’t ask for one, Millie,’ and I said, ‘No, nor you did, but I thought you might like one,’ and she said, ‘You’re turning into a mind-reader.’

I didn’t know how to bring it up and so I didn’t say nothing but I just sort of lingered there, and then Miss Rosie said, ‘What are you waiting for, Millie?’ and then she said, ‘Why are you blushing?’ and I said, ‘I’m all sort of confused, miss. I’m all of a doodah.’

‘Confused, Millie? All of a doodah? Whatever about?’

I didn’t know what to say, and I was right embarrassed, and then she said, ‘I did notice, you know. I’ve never seen anything so obvious. His name is Corporal Leonard Hutchinson, and he was my fiancé’s best friend at the front.’

I said, ‘Oh no, he’s not at the front. Oh cripes.’

Miss Rosie said, ‘They don’t all get killed.’

‘Sometimes it’s worse,’ I said. ‘I seen ’em, all blind and burned and things. It’s horrible, miss.’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘I look after them every day at Netley.’

‘Excuse me askin’, miss, but will Mr Hutchinson be comin’ back here?’

‘I’ll try to make sure that he does, Millie.’

I said, ‘Thank you, Miss Rosie,’ and she said, ‘You know you can’t carry on working here if you get married?’ and I said, ‘Who’s talkin’ about getting wed? And anyway, this war’s changed everything round, hasn’t it? Nothing’s normal any more, is it, miss? I mean, a lady like you workin’ in a hospital and lookin’ after young men like that, that didn’t used to be usual, did it? And now it is,’ and she said, ‘We can’t look ahead any more, Millie. Thank you for bringing the tea. It was very thoughtful of you.’

‘That’s what I like about you, miss,’ I said. ‘You’re always thanking me and there’s many that don’t, not naming any names,’ and Miss Rosie laughed ’cause she knew who I was meaning. In them days Miss Rosie and the master were the only two what treated me like I had feelings like a human.

‘We all get taken for granted sometimes,’ said Miss Rosie.

1

Dear Miss McCosh,

You will I am sure excuse a hurried note but I did want you to know that I shall be thinking of you at Eastertime and praying that the Resurrection joy may be yours in all its fullness. Your dear one will be very near to you, and the certainty of it at Eastertide is beyond all description. I am sure that all our stricken hearts will be really comforted. May God’s Blessing and Comfort be yours through Jesus Christ Our Saviour and Risen God.

With very kind regards, yours very sincerely,

H. V. Fairhead, CF

Passed by no. 1900 censor

2

The Grampians

10 April 1915

Dear Reverend Captain Fairhead,

Thank you so much for your recent letter at Eastertide. I must say I am astonished that you are able to keep up such a rate of correspondence when by now you must have attended hundreds of deaths. If you are writing to every bereaved family at the same rate as you are writing to ours, then yours must be a life entirely without sleep. I would beg you not to deplete yourself with overwork.

You may know Corporal Leonard Hutchinson, who was my fiancé’s best friend. I met him recently, and he spoke very highly of you.

I do know how busy you must be, because I am now working at the Victoria Military Hospital at Netley, in Southampton, as a VAD. Everybody calls it Spike Island, or ‘Spikey’ for short. The work is gruelling and relentless. One sees and hears such truly ghastly things that it is sometimes hard to keep control of one’s own sanity, a whole universe is too small to contain the tears that one could shed, and I know that if our chaplains wrote as frequently and conscientiously as you do, they would very quickly be exhausted. I cannot but think that your friendship and bond of brotherly love with Ashbridge must have been unusually intense for you to be so preoccupied by his death in particular, when you have to deal with so many, and when you have been so grievously wounded by the loss of your own dear sister.

I would be most honoured and grateful if you could find the time, when next on leave, to call in and see us. I would wish to meet with you and converse in person. There is much that I would like to discuss with you. There are soldiers in the hospital who tell me the most extra-ordinary things. I have, you may rest assured, clung most tenaciously to my faith — how else could I have survived? I would otherwise have died of heartbreak and loneliness — and despite the hideousness of what is being done to the lives and bodies of our beautiful young men, I cling also to the faith that Ashbridge died in a worthy cause. The death of your poor sister in an attack from the air, explicitly directed at civilians, proves that we are confronting a terrible evil, and have no choice but to do so. I know that Ash would never have thought that it was vain to lay down one’s life at a time like this.