Unless you were Joe Patience, that is, who had only just come back to number sixteen after two years away, although he hadn’t been serving in France or fighting in Belgium. Instead, he’d been locked up in Wormwood Scrubs because he refused to become a soldier. They only let him out again because he’d suffered so many beatings inside; the last one had come so close to killing him that there’d been the threat of a prison scandal. Now Joe was back living two doors up, but he almost never left his house and certainly never sat outside playing his clarinet like he did before the war began. Granny Summerfield called him a scoundrel and a coward; Mrs. Milchin said that he should be strung up on the nearest lamppost. Even Helena Morris, who used to be sweet on him, said that he shouldn’t be allowed to live near decent, respectable people.
Only Margie and Old Bill Hemperton still had anything to do with him. Margie insisted that he was Georgie’s oldest friend and that whatever the rights and wrongs of his situation, he’d suffered enough for his beliefs. Old Bill simply said that he was his own man too and wouldn’t be told who he could and couldn’t speak to, not while there was still breath in his body. Neither of which was a good enough excuse to satisfy Granny Summerfield, who couldn’t hear the man’s name spoken aloud without flying into a rage.
Three months after he turned the corner of Damley Road, Georgie was no longer in England. Along with the other new soldiers, he took a train to Southampton and from there a boat to Calais, and after that his letters started to arrive less frequently, and when they did they sometimes had great black marks through the lines so Alfie and his mum couldn’t read every word.
“That’s the bosses,” explained Margie. “They read everyone’s letters and if there’s anything in there that they don’t want us to know about, they cross it out. They don’t want us to know the truth. They’re afraid of it.”
The tone of Georgie’s letters changed over time. When he was in training at Aldershot he used to tell stories about the pranks the men played on each other at the barracks and the trouble they were always getting into with Sergeant Clayton. It sounded more like a holiday camp than anything else. But when he got to France, everything changed. He stopped talking about the soldiers serving alongside him and just talked about himself, about how he was feeling.
It’s horrible here. We spend our days digging trenches seven feet deep in the mud, then before they collapse we have to build wooden fortifications at the side. They say the Germans have steel walls on theirs. Whenever it rains, the sides of our trenches cave in and we have to use whatever we can find to scoop the water out. Sometimes I use my helmet but I’m not supposed to, as that’s the quickest way to get a bullet through the head. There’s rats everywhere. And worse. I could live with the rats. I don’t know what half these creatures are. Why did I come here, I don’t know. God, what a mistake.
Margie didn’t let Alfie read this letter. But he knew it had come because he’d seen it on the mat, the War Office seal displayed prominently on the envelope. “It’s private,” Margie told him after she read it in the broken armchair in front of the fireplace. “Just between your father and me. But he says he loves you and he thinks about you all the time.”
“Read it out,” said Alfie.
“No.”
“Read it out!”
“I said no!” cried Margie, leaping up so quickly that Alfie jumped back in surprise. At which point she simply stared at him, looked as if she might burst into tears, and ran from the room.
She didn’t put this letter between the pages of the Bible. Instead she hid it underneath her mattress, but Alfie knew all Margie’s hiding places and waited until she was gone to work to read it. He read it five times, and each time it made him sadder and sadder.
After this, Margie didn’t let him read any of the letters that came, but she put them in the same place so he always knew where to find them and where to hide them again whenever she called up the stairs to him.
God, Margie, what am I doing here? It’s awful. And I’ve done terrible things. Can’t live with myself sometimes. I think of you and—
“Alfie, I’m home! Are you upstairs? Come down and tell me how your day was!”
They say we’re getting closer to the Belgian lines, but it’s hard to believe we’re getting closer to anything. We dig more trenches and let the old ones collapse in on themselves. Then we wait till it gets dark and Corporal Moody decides whose turn it is to go over the top. Ten at a time. Ten more standing on the ladder. Ten more on the base of the trench. No point complaining. Sometimes I think it would be easier if—
“Alfie! Answer the door, will you? If it’s the milkman, tell him I’ll pay him next week!”
They sent me over as a stretcher bearer last night, love. On account of how I cheeked the sergeant. He’s not right in the head, that one, if you ask me. I brought back six bodies—rotten to look at, they were. But I brought them back and managed to survive it. There’s only one in five stretcher bearers make it through the night. They usually send the conchies over, not us. I brought one lad back, Margie, and put him with the other bodies. They were piled up together like sacks of rubbish. It was only as I walked away that I saw one of his eyes open. I nearly shouted out with—
“Alfie! Tea’s ready. Where are you, are you upstairs? Don’t let it get cold!”
There’s all sorts going on out here now, Margie. Eight different battalions all mixed together. Something happened a few days ago, a bad business in one of the German trenches. Some of our lot captured it, and four soldiers were told to stay there and keep it safe. When we got back it turned out there’d been a German boy still alive and they’d shot him. And now all hell’s broken out about the rights and wrongs of it. One lad says it’s a damn shame and he wants the sergeant to do something about it. The others say it doesn’t matter, that this is going on all the time, so where’s the difference? I don’t know. Seems to me if he was alone and unarmed they should have taken him in. There’s rules, isn’t there, and—
“Alfie!”
Georgie had stopped writing altogether a year ago. Either that or Margie had found somewhere else to hide his letters, although Alfie didn’t think that was the case because he’d searched everywhere. The very last letter stashed under her mattress was the most confusing of all. Alfie had read it so many times, he could have recited it from memory, but still none of the words or sentences made much sense to him.
… going to get out of here, am I? They’re everywhere, they are. Eating at my feet. My legs are sore. Bonzo Daly left the tarpaulin off the milk churns and the birds got at them. Stop now, stop now. You heard that one, didn’t you, Margie, if you were the only girl in the world and I was the only boy. What is he now, eight? He must be all grown up. Wouldn’t recognize him. We shot him, didn’t we, on account of how he was complaining about everything. I didn’t want any part of it, but the sergeant said I had no choice or I’d be court-martialed too. The look on Sadler’s face afterwards! Made me laugh, it did. Nothing else would matter in the world today. Stay where you are and then leave—that’s what he says over and over. Stay where you are and then leave. Makes no sense. We could go on loving in the same old way. Can’t sleep, can I? All your fault, all your bloody fault. This headache won’t go. What was it that Wells sang that night? If you were the only Boche in the trench and I had the only bomb … Help me, Margie, can’t you? Help me. They said it’d be over by Christmas. They just didn’t say which Christmas. Everywhere I look all I can see is—