Small Lives, Big World Read online

  Yet he knew. He knew by his profuse sweating, which was more than just because of the heat; he knew by his hostile resentment of the stranger opposite; by his straining to catch every decipherable syllable from the next room that he wanted to live, wanted to work, wanted to be. But he also knew he hadn’t the strength left to try again if it ended this time as it had done so often in the last three years.

  Then they heard the door being opened. For the first time both men looked at each other and there, in that instant, they bonded. All was forgiven and each felt the other’s pain and hope. They were brothers.

  The sweet, smiling, confident young woman with the large Afro stepped into the room.

  “Mr Parsons?” she asked in a friendly voice.

  TIME IS RELATIVE

  There was something deeply satisfying in the click of the electric platform clock as it registered the passing of another minute. Another minute closer to the train’s arrival.

  12:16

  The screen showed that the 12:46 to Edinburgh via Doncaster and York was expected at its appointed hour. Just another thirty minutes and then he would be on the way back to the city he hadn’t seen in fifty years. He closed his eyes and was walking along Princes Street – a young man in a tweed jacket, Brylcreem and brogues.

  “Thirty more minutes! Oh no! That’s like, forever! …Granddad, how long is thirty minutes?”

  The old man was shaken from his reverie by the eager, fidgety six-year-old tugging at his sleeve.

  “What’s that? Thirty minutes. Why, it’s the tiniest time! When Mummy takes you to school in the car, I bet that’s much longer than thirty minutes. When you are older, thirty minutes will be a quick as a sneeze – Atchoo!”

  “How old will I be then, Granddad?”

  “When?”

  “When I’m older? Will I be as old as you?”

  “And how old do you think I am?”

  “Oh like, really old!”

  The child started counting on his mittened fingers. Holding up both hands, fingers splayed he said, “You are really old – thirty-five? Yes,” he declared, “you are thirty-five… That’s old isn’t it, Granddad?”

  The old man smiled, “Yes, that is really old, but I am even older. I am older than you can count!”

  “Wow!” exclaimed the boy staring in open-mouthed wonder at his superannuated grandparent.

  A work crew strolled along the tracks. The boy waved at them and the men waved back.

  12:24

  Together they watched in silence as a freight train clacked and creaked, scraped and whined, clanged and rattled its way through the station.

  “Granddad… Ben says that when we get old, we die, like Ben’s rabbit. He was only four but Ben says that’s really old for a rabbit because they are small. His dad planted it in the garden like a tree. When you die, will Daddy plant you in the garden too?”

  “Well, I may be old, but I don’t think I would make a very good tree, so I won’t die just yet.”

  “Good. I don’t want you to be a tree.”

  12:32

  “Granddad, thirty minutes is nearly over now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. See, I told you it was the tiniest time!”

  “So how long will the train take to go to Edingbug?”

  “Edinburgh.”

  “Yes, how long will it take to go to Edingbug?”

  “About two and a half hours.”

  “Two and a half hours! …Granddad, is two and a half hours a long time?”

  The platform clock blinked and 12:35 gave way to 12:36. A few notes on a pre-recorded glockenspiel and a muffled announcement prevented any immediate reply from the old man. The train slid into the station – noiselessly to the old man, nothing like the hissing, chugging, smoke-belching steam locomotives of his salad days – ear-splittingly loudly to the child, just like a spaceship.

  “On a train, two and a half hours is like thirty minutes when you are standing still. There is so much to see – trees, fields, cows, horses, towns and villages. You won’t even notice the time.”

  “Well, I want to live on a train so I can grow up quicker and drive Daddy’s car!”

  They settled into their seats and both the boy and his grandfather looked excitedly out of the window. After twenty minutes, the old man drifted off somewhere between sleep and memory. The little boy yawned, put his head on the armrest and clutching his grandfather’s coat, he fell asleep.

  They both slept until the guard gently woke them at Waverley Station.

  THE CHRISTMAS CARD

  The following story was inspired by an item appearing on the BBC News website on Thursday 15th February 2007.

  A postcard sent from the trenches in World War One has just been delivered – 90 years late.

  Soldier Walter Butler was eighteen and fighting in the trenches in France when he sent the card to his fiancée, Amy Hicks, in Colerne, Wiltshire.

  Walter knew he was going to die. The thought of his imminent death held no fear for him. He had faced it so often and seen so much of it in the past few months in this featureless Flanders wasteland that the prospect of dying neither surprised nor terrified him.

  If anything, he felt a dark sense of irony. For what was killing him weren’t the bullets of the Germans, nor the mustard gas, nor the cold steel of an unrelenting bayonet that had done for so many of his mates in the trenches. Nor was it the murderous cold or the disease that riddled this underfed, poorly clothed, disastrously led, rabble of human cannon-fodder; the wilted flower of a generation sacrificed to the caprice and useless pride of a handful of European royal cousins. It was a biscuit box that had done it for Walter. Foraging for food for himself and a wounded comrade among the putrid body parts in the bottom of a trench slick with mud, blood and human waste, Walter had cut his hand open on the jagged edge of an empty biscuit tin. He was so caked in filth and slime, he barely noticed. When he clambered back into the rotting wooden shelter that passed as a staging post for wounded soldiers waiting for the stretcher-bearers to pick them up and carry them back a few hundred yards behind the lines to the butcher’s yard that was laughingly called a field hospital, Walter found that his mate, Billy, was dead. At eighteen and a half, he was two weeks younger than Walter.

  “Poor sod. But just as well,” he thought grimly. Billy had been blinded by a grenade and had lost an arm. Death was a mercy. It was also a mercy for the stretcher-bearers, the bravest men in the army, who could postpone their next foray for a little while. Unarmed, they often faced the fury of the battle to ferry the dead and dying away from the killing fields. People always talked about the three-week average life expectancy of a pilot. The life of a stretcher-bearer was often half that.

  It was late November 1916. Walter didn’t even really know where he was. It all looked the same anyway. It was just mile upon mile of flat, barbed wire-strewn, half-frozen mud, and so cold that Walter felt no pain in his hand. He was so filthy that he paid scant attention to the blood clotted in his palm. It had been weeks since he could feel his fingers anyway. Ten days after he had cut himself, Walter lay on a flea-infested mattress, in a field hospital, shivering under a threadbare horse blanket, drifting in and out of occasionally delirious consciousness, half aware of the dull thud and boom of distant artillery. The young Scottish nurse held his trembling hand and caressed him with soothing words; she reminded him of Amy in that she was everything this war was not: kind, gentle and soft. Such kindness after such brutality was almost more than Walter could bear. He sent her away to find him a pen and an army issue regimental postcard. He wanted to send Amy a Christmas card, to let her know that he loved her while he still had a little time. The blood poisoning was in an advanced stage and the young lieutenant doctor, another Scot called Calder from Sutherland – barely older than Walter himself who had been in the third year of his medical studies at the Univ
ersity of Edinburgh when he was called up – could do nothing. Even if he could have helped, he had no drugs; nothing to ease the pain. They had run out of morphine months ago. He was 23 but he looked 50. Two years later, the week after Armistice, Hamish Calder would take his service revolver, which he had never drawn before, and put a bullet in his brain.

  Walter barely had the strength to write and even then he had to do so with his left hand as they had amputated the right hand in a vain attempt to stop the spread of the poisoning. The nurse propped his head up on the ragged remains of his greatcoat and holding his hand in hers helped him write on the card, which was regulation ivory-white and bore a small ribbon of blue and red in the regimental colours and a sketch of a cheerful sprig of holly for decoration. There were tears in both their eyes as they wrote:

  ‘My dearest Amy,

  A very Merry Christmas to you and your family. I will be home soon, so don’t cry and be the brave, lovely girl that I know you to be.

  Your ever loving, Walter.’

  There was neither the space, nor the strength for any more. As the nurse finished writing the address which Walter dictated to her, she thought of this poor girl back in a little farm cottage in Wiltshire, and how she would never see her beau again, and a tear spilled onto the card, smudging the date, 10th December 1916. She dried her eyes and went to make her patient more comfortable. But Walter was now beyond the pain, beyond the trenches, beyond the misery. She closed his unseeing eyes and took the postcard to give to the regimental dispatch while the orderlies took the body from the bed because there were others who needed it now.

  Back at the little cottage on the farm in Wiltshire, Amy had no idea that Walter would never be coming home to marry her. She sat by the fire, knitting a little blanket, her plump silhouette flickering on the stone wall behind her. When Walter, looking so handsome and full of life, had proposed on his last day on the farm before going off to training camp, Amy hadn’t hesitated. They had been sweethearts since Miss Gordon’s class in the village school when they were six years old. They had gone for a walk and on that balmy late April afternoon, when he had asked and she had joyously agreed with tears in her eyes; they went hand in hand into the little spinney down by the river and had tenderly, if a little clumsily, made love for the first and only time in their young lives. When she discovered she was pregnant, her parents were dismayed but not overly angry. Things like that tended to happen more often in the country, especially in wartime, her mother had explained. Amy wasn’t sure whether she believed her mother but there was no scandal. After all, everyone in the village knew that she and Walter were to be married and it was only natural what with him going off to war. Amy didn’t know for certain but she thought that it would be different in a big city like Salisbury. In any event, she decided not to tell Walter in her letters because she didn’t want him to worry about her and not look after himself as he ought. The baby, a little girl, was born in January 1917. Two weeks later, Walter’s father called at the cottage to see his granddaughter ‘for the third time this week’, laughing at the gruff yet good-natured ploughman’s pride in his new kin. But he just stood at the threshold, wordless, clutching a piece of paper in his trembling, hoary hands. Amy knew what it was immediately. Everybody always knew. It was Army Form B. 104-82 from the War Office.

  ***

  Wendy Pennington yawned, stirred her coffee as quietly as she could and tried to will away her splitting headache and suppress the wave of nausea that was surging within her.

  “Another day, another hangover,” she murmured bitterly in a hoarse whisper. As she tried to sip the coffee as delicately as possible, Wendy contemplated her relatively new surroundings with little of the excitement she had hoped and longed for.

  It was five days before Christmas, her forty-somethingth birthday and her first weekend in the cottage. She had started as head of the art department at the local secondary school at the beginning of the academic year that September, and had been living as a reluctant flatmate with an equally reluctant host, a geography teacher called Simon who hated company but needed the rent, until the sale of the cottage went through.

  Groaning slightly, Wendy went to one of the many still-to-be-unpacked cardboard boxes in the corner of the kitchen to search with rather more hope than expectation for some aspirin. Returning to her chair empty-handed, she surveyed the remains of her previous evening’s supper; a large bowl of pasta with butter and half a tub of vanilla ice-cream, straight from the tub. She had used the same fork for both. There was also an empty bottle of red Bordeaux and an almost empty mug containing the flotsam of a used teabag and several cigarette ends. A crushed packet of Silk Cut, a yellow plastic lighter and an open laptop computer on stand-by mode completed the scene. Wendy sighed and coughed and tried not to feel as bedraggled and dire as she thought she must look.

  Gingerly taking another sip of her coffee, Wendy pressed a key and the laptop screen flickered into life and welcomed her by name. Tapping another few keys with one finger, Wendy checked her inbox. There were three new messages and all of them wishing her a happy birthday – one from her car insurer, another from a gym in Southend, which she had joined three years ago and had attended precisely once thereafter, and the third from her mother:

  “Dear Gwendolyn,

  Wishing you many happy returns and season’s greetings and that you finally find your direction in life,

  Mother.”

  Not, ‘love, Mum’ or anything so warm. She even combined the ‘happy birthday’ with the ‘Merry Christmas’ in the driest fashion. It had been the same thing with her combined birthday and Christmas present as a little girl. The one thing that cheered Wendy up was knowing how much her mother would hate to be reminded that her daughter was well over forty years old! Miserable cow! It was bad enough she had saddled her daughter with the absurd name of Gwendolyn and made her early years an affectionless wasteland, but now she had the barefaced cheek to criticise her whenever she made, thankfully rare, contact. No wonder Dad buggered off with that cruise ship, Wendy thought. She couldn’t blame her dad. He had borne the full brunt of the chilled bitterness from his wife as long as possible and then one day when Wendy was ten had given her a big hug, twenty pounds and told her he was, “Right sorry, Petal, but she’ll be the bloody death of me.” He left as a Steward with P&O and had kept in touch regularly, right up to his death three years ago in his whitewashed bungalow in the Algarve. It was the money from the sale of this ‘little sun-soaked villa’, as he was fond of calling it, which had substantially paid for the cottage.

  As soon as Wendy had done her A levels, she left her mother to her Edwardian terraced townhouse in Cheltenham and her several elderly lodgers, and went to Oxford Polytechnic to study art with vague dreams of becoming a fabulous sculptress, notorious for wild parties with the sort of bright young things from the gossip columns. However, Wendy was a diligent but limited artist, allergic to marijuana and wasn’t ‘the sort of girl that blokes shag, more the sort their mums would like them to marry’. Talk about damning with faint praise! When you are trying your best to be a naughty, wannabe wild child, the last thing you want to hear is that you’d make someone a nice little wife! The worst of it was, Wendy secretly thought so too. She found the whole messy business of anonymous fumbling around on top of the coats in the bedroom; standing around in your bare feet on unknown kitchen floors sticky with Lord knows what; and forever listening to your new best friend pour out her heart about what a bastard, Tim or Kevin or Barry was, all rather unpleasant. Halfway through her final year, Wendy decided that she had had quite enough of drugs and casual sex; that is to say, two joints, both of which made her vomit copiously, and two boyfriends, one in her first year who she went out with for six months and didn’t sleep with and another in her second year with whom she had uncomfortable, although not unpleasant, sex on three occasions in a Datsun Cherry in a four-week period and who had then dumped her to go back to his former
girlfriend who he hadn’t officially broken up with anyway.

  She applied for teacher-training college and a year and a half later got a job teaching art at an Oxford comprehensive school. Life went on with just a few more downs than ups, as is often the case for young teachers, and Wendy moved schools and painted in her spare time. By her later twenties the ups and downs had called a truce and Wendy, while not exactly happy was content, although she felt she was becoming decidedly spinsterish at an early age. But it wasn’t her age, it was her attitude. She had no interest in casual relationships, although there had been a couple of minor flings. She wanted – she didn’t know what – not great passion but a good, kind man who loved her and who would show her the affection she had been denied by her mother after her father had left. So far, there had been no likely candidates. She didn’t mind too much. Just occasionally when her mother called to find out how she was, in other words, to find out whether she had met a man yet, gleefully waiting for a negative answer which would enable her to launch into another flinty-voiced lecture, Wendy would have liked, just once, to have been able to confound her by saying she had met the most wonderful man in the world. Still, she didn’t complain at her lot. She was now an established, and very good, art teacher in a small school in Hampshire and had even sold a fair few of her paintings via a local restaurant. She gave extra lessons to the owner’s daughter, who was very talented and in return, her father let Wendy put her paintings on the walls of the restaurant with a discreet price tag attached. The owner took a modest commission which paid for the extra art lessons for his daughter, so everyone was happy.