Authors: Niall Griffiths
Where is this even the sign said OUISTREHAM. Three fucking hours in France or is this Belgium just not home THREE hours only and now this, this cringing cowering mud pain terror.
PAIN. A burning spot on his lower leg he is aware of this now with the adrenalin running out and he reaches down to feel and his fingers sink into his calf. Sucked into warm mush and sharp jagged chips of something what can they be but bone.
—Oh God … Oh God … helpmehelpmehelpme please please … oh God save me …
His inner child wailing this high-pitched pleading. He pulls what’s left of his pack on top of him but bits of it still burn and he shoves it off. The explosions and screaming have ceased and he can hear voices now talking in a tongue that is not his.
He sits up. There is another figure close to him, in the ditch. There is enough light still for him to recognise this figure as Ernie Riley who he went to school with and to see also that there is a wound in his throat like a second mouth a toothless mouth on the side of his neck that drools blood black in the fading light. Wrecked muscle hangs in fronds over a jagged lightless hole.
Gunshots. Those non-English voices getting closer, louder, punctuated by single scattered shots. Ernie is trying to speak and more blood flicks with each attempted and aborted word. He clutches at Leon’s legs and his stiff fingers jab into the calf wound. Leon bites a scream back and jerks his leg away. Ernie’s eyes beg.
Shouldn’t even fuckin be here. Should be fighting
with
them demons and not against them those lords of war they will win, surely win, will walk the world. Straddle seas. Such ravening slaughterers what am I doing here pitched against them.
Someone will pay for this. Someone is going to pay for bringing him here to this muddy ditch in France beslimed as he is reduced to this caked and cringing state. They can light up the sky with the inferno of their will. Someone
must
pay.
Louder, the voices. Very close now. Ernie is scrabbling at his chest at the soaked serge of his shirt. His hands clench in the debris from the pack now utterly without use and something hard presses against his right palm. A familiar shape.
His jackknife. Made by C. Johnson & Co. of Sheffield. Marlin spike, tin opener, bottle opener, screwdriver. A useful little tool.
And stainless-steel blade. A very useful little tool.
He thumbs the blade out. Ernie is on top of him now, his gaping neck-wound up against his face and he pushes him away and looks elsewhere as he plunges the blade into that wound and rips to the left. Instantly his hand is hot and wet and Ernie bucks and twists and falls back against him facing upwards at the wounded sky. His face pressed against Ernie’s skull in his oily matted hair, hot fluid pumping into his eyes, into his silent-roaring mouth.
cowardice
They scrumped apples together, once. Sagged school and went fishing in the canal and caught nothing. Stole soda siphons from the backyards of pubs and cashed them in in grocers’ shops and with the pennies
bought
gobstoppers that turned their mouths purple. Met each other in the recruitment office on Lime Street. Drank beer together.
So cowardice
No, someone. Someone will pay.
A light sweeps across the ditch. Ernie has now stopped twitching and gurgling on top of him and he holds his heavy body tight to his chest. A nearby voice in the darkness grunts and speaks:
—
Er ist tot. Ja, sie sind alle tot
.
And this is how it sounds, the end of the world. Armageddon speaks in an excited voice, the voice of a child delirious with damage, his horrible and hectic excitement in those mere words.
This is it.
I will make someone pay. I promise the world that someone will pay for this.
Unconscious under a corpse, sinking slowly in filth. Torn, tattered, bone exposed to the rent air still spongy with cordite and burnt meat. These two tangled inside the crust of the upheavaling earth and which is dead and which still lives can be discerned only by the ongoing trickling and not clotting of snatched blood.
This is it.
THE SS MALARKAND
It was a barrage balloon, broken and rogue, that ignited the fire. An insane floating whale it drifted across the dark water of Huskisson Docks on 1 May 1941 and collided with the moored SS
Malarkand
which had in its hold 1,000 tons of high explosive bound for the
Middle
East. These flames unquenchable, insatiable, then guided the
Luftwaffe
in towards their target and the burning ship with its apocalyptic cargo was hit with high-explosive bombs which explosions produced more explosions and so on until the entire hold itself exploded. The following day, as dawn rose, a dockside crane four miles away eighty feet up in its girders sported an odd, new growth: the
Malarkand
’s five-ton anchor. Huge and hanging there above the staring crowd, transfixed, men and women and children. The ship itself still burned and around it the oily sea still lapped but a flame had been struck that no water could douse and awe at the might that could toss steel tonnage as a child might flick a fly. Minds, hearts stilled before the force that stalked the world and attenuated by terror down into a reactive arsenal of two: revenge or collaboration. Resistance or conversion. And nothing within that of any understanding of the terrible power of destruction to simplify or maybe there was as whatever reaction stripped further and unadorned terminally eroded revealed at its barest bones just the one awesome imperative: to live and live and live. Not just live, but live for ever.
ALASTAIR, HIS GRANDMOTHER: HER LEAVING
It being an evening on which the sun still beamed although sunk low enough to diadem the peak of Moel Eilio they had made a table outside under the yew tree out of two rain barrels and a door and on it stacked bowls and plates of food and drink; a huge
boiled
ham, deeply pink and leaking, jugs of buttermilk and beer and water from the spring so fresh it writhed, mounds of potatoes boiled in their skins like speckled eggs and also speckled eggs themselves hard-boiled, fried carrots and loaves of bread which when tapped echoed and green bursts of lettuce and cabbage and a crusted wheel of cheese the rind of which reminded Kate of the skin of her own hands and heels, farm-calloused as they were. There was butter like a melting yellow boulder oozing whey and onions slow-baked in their skins and a long flat barky slice of fried liver. This last had been prepared especially for Kate being as it was her very favourite but the nervous acids in her stomach would allow her to do no more than nibble. Added to this the word itself and its two syllables and the hint in them of where she was going and it was like imbibing her impending loss. Like taking into her her creeping fear and it curdling inside her, thrashing, like a pregnancy to a viper.
Usually at such times as these their words would flutter like fritillaries, jostle like midges in the clean air between them;
yr hen iaith
would burgeon here among the hills and skim off the lakes as for centuries it had done but this day, it had been decided, would be exclusively given over to Saesneg so that Kate’s tongue and palate could grow accustomed. As a kind of rehearsal, a foretaste of what was to come. Occasionally their lips flapped and tongues shuddered and throats juggled as if gulping under the alien strain of this strange language although all were fluent in it and had been for a generation or two, yet the eldest present had memories of the Knot and the weight of
it
around her neck and shoulders and on that she not unfairly blamed her stoop, her hunched back which had come premature, in her mid-teens. And the butter churned on the farm had a gentle, murmuring quality to it, it was soft, pliant, malleable, creamy on the tongue with a spark of salt at the lips and a tender coating on the gum and tooth all plap and mimble and so it was
not
‘butter’; it was and always would be
ymenyn
.
Kate’s father leaned with a jug.
—Cwrw, Katie?
A tut from her mother.
—
Beer
, Katie?
And another tut. —She’s had
three
, Aled. She do not wish to be drunk arriving at the Johnsons’, do you, cariad? Fine show that would be.
—Ach, nonsense.
Her father filled her cup. The beer, golden and headless, tinkled as it fell and hissed as it settled. She smiled at her dad and tipped the cup to her lips and drank, just sipped. This beer was something she had always loved. She would spend the next six decades in the big city trying to recapture the taste of this home-brewed beer in party and pub and off-licence and would always, always fail.
—Yew drink, bach. Settle yewer nerves.
—Do not be scaring her now, her younger brother said. —It’s not
London
or anywhere she’s going to. It isn’t far.
—No, but, her
much
younger sister said, —it’s very big, but. Ellie Siop went last year with her taid and it’s bigger than Bangor, she told me. Bigger even than Chester, she said.
—Stop yewer stories now, blant, her mother said and then in response to her husband’s raised eyebrows: —
Children
. It
isn’t
very far. Wmffra Evans goes there every month and back and he’s an old man, he’s sixty-three. And my mam used to as well, didn’t yew, Mam?
The grandmother mumbled, asleep. Striped by shadow of branch her old shrunken body slumbered around beer and gin.
—Will it be safe from the war, tho, Dad?
—Of
course
it will be, bach, the mother said.
—Safer than here, even, Aled said. —Plenty of essential industries in the big city, see. The Johnsons, they work in armaments. Rich? DuwDuw. More money than everyone in Caernarfon all added up.
—Everyone?
Aled nodded. —So eyr needed, see, for the war effort. Needed to make more guns. But round yur, see, all-a people round yur, all
we
can be is soldiers. Us men. We’re not needed yur, see, so to the Brass we’re just … we’re …
Unable to find the word he looked to his wife for help but her lips only tightened.
—Expendable, Kate said. —Yewer all expendable. That’s the word.
His eyes lit up. —That’s the word, Katie, aye. He looked to his other offspring. —See why yewer sister’s got herself such a good job? See why she’s off to the big city to make her living?
Clever
.
He raised his cup to Kate and drank. His eyes sparkled at her over the rim.
—Will
I
be needed for the war, Dad? Will
yew
?
—DuwDuw son, no. It’ll all be over before yewer old enough to go.
—How do yew know?
—I just do. Too young to understand yet, yew are.
—What about yew? Will yew be going?
—Ach. The mother leaned and cuffed lightly her son on the back of his head. —Shut up that talking now. Kate’s last day yur it is. War stories, DuwDuw. It’s yewer sister’s last day.
—Not for long, tho, Mam, is it? Yew said it wasn’t far. Be back soon yew will, won’t yew? The youngest daughter looked at Katie with wet eyes.
—Course I will, Kate said and smiled and sipped at her beer and nibbled at the liver congealing in grease on the plate and true it
wasn’t
far, could in fact be travelled in a day from here, Capel Garmon (neolithic burial chamber, multi-chambered, central chamber topped by enormous capstone; the White Horse Inn, views of Eryri from chamber or village cemetery), to there, Liverpool (docks and enormous buildings and hurrying hordes of all hues), yet between the two places was the sharp sky-puncturing spike of Moel Eilio and beyond that Yr Wyddfa itself and the Glyderau and the Carneddau, such colossal ramparts, impassable, their bulwark bulk seeming to jeer at the very notion of human traffic across them. And scattered among them in their valleys split as if by nothing but wrath or on their cold plateaus and wailing moors the lakes, Llydaw and Ogwen and Cowlyd, blood-freezing and black as tea stewed milkless or as old blood in the byres. And beyond them the Gwydyr forest and beyond that the River Conwy and then the Vale of the same name with
its
crags and streams and then the smaller mountains, Moel Seisiog and Moel Llyn and the Mynydd Hiraethog itself that empty wilderness cut only by drover’s trail and sheeptrack and lost in its bogs the bones of the waylaid or the wandering and discernible in its winds ever-wailing the souls of those dead as many over the aeons as those then disintegrating under gas and shrapnel in a distant country all testament to the million varieties of human extinction. And still beyond that the sea at Prestatyn and the River Dee which must be traversed by ferry above the mud at low tide black and reeking or indeed skirted at Chester this route in fact taken by the train to the Birkenhead docks where warships appeared in the water beneath the tall and claw-fingered cranes facing the other docks across the murky Mersey where also other vessels would appear, those outgoing filled with singing and a celebration of sorts and those returning drifting silently into dock themselves like phantoms, these huge ships cargoed with pain and loss, and floating across the gangplanks those who have left their limbs and more commonly their minds elsewhere. Then across the conurbation the bricks and cobbles and human mass, that huddled hysteria that characterises port cities and what might Katie find there in that storm of mingled life? Only something
not
found in the pool-eyes of lambs or in the gentle tumbling of milk to curd. Only something
not
found in songbird or bee or flower or the sweetening of grass to hay and the sugary burst of that from a cow’s mouth on a morning before the swelling sun has melted the frost and the grass still spears pallid from the meadow and maybe not found
even
on the shrieking peaks where the rain falls enraged enough to bounce thigh-high from the old stone underfoot and where sky-high lofty lightning illuminates abrupt and sudden thunders. But shared perhaps in field and grotto in rock agleam with schist and brick-wall fluffed with soot, the slice of knife or grunt of gun in trough or gutter, pit or drain down which fluids flow to one set end, and mirrored and indeed culminated in the mass movement of men to a killing field enormous, continent-wide bloodfeast and frenzy just these teeth that snap and blades that gleam and shear the transmogrification of mammal to meat and such red necessity. And that the sum of any plunge into the beating breast wherever it may be found on high crag or pavement slab, peak or dockside will uproot only the proof if it were ever called for that the throb that drives the shovel can only simply be purely because the engine red and fleshy that propels these green needs will buckle and break time and time over only because things die, things die.