Battle of the Somme
Missing presumed dead
Thiepval. The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. ‘A massive, brick-arched statement of our collective conscience.’ Bearing the names of 73,412 men without a grave, ranked and filed for war.
My uncle’s name is etched into that stone: NEVARD HP. I never knew him, of course; neither did his youngest sister, my mother; he was killed, in the week of his 21st birthday, in 1916, before she was even born. 
I have a rose in my garden called Somme, planted to mark the centenary of his death; it’s in flower right now.
So, the name Thiepval has a special resonance for me, and that drew me to In Pale Batallions, a novel by one of my favourite authors, Robert Goddard. Thiepval forms the starting point for a mystery in the family of Leonora Galloway.
When we first meet her, she’s a recent widow, visiting the site for the first time, accompanied by her daughter, Penelope. Together they look at her father’s name commemorated on the massive stone monument, and check the records inside:
HALLOWS, Captain the Hon John, son of Edward, Lord Powerstock … aged 29 years.
But … the date of Captain John’s presumed death is recorded as 30 April 1916 … Leonora wasn’t born until 14 March 1917 … Penelope immediately suspects a simple wartime romance and illegitimate birth. Could this be the cause of the rift between them and her mother’s aristocratic heritage? But no, her mother, says, she has always known John was not her real father; Olivia, the second Lady Powerstock, made sure of that! But only now that her husband is dead, does Leonora feel free to confide in her daughter, tell her who she really is, and what she has discovered about her history.
Part 1 it told through the voice of Leonora. Hers was a lonely unloved childhood. The Powerstock title having ended with John’s death on the Somme, her mother, Miriam, having died of smallpox when Leonora is only a few days old, she is brought up by her paternal grandparents though neither money nor title ever finds its way to her. When her grandfather dies, his second wife, Olivia, becomes Leonora’s sole guardian, a vicious woman who loses no opportunity to taunt Leonora with her mother’s sullied reputation and her own illegitimacy, turning Leonora into an unpaid domestic servant in her own home, isolated from the world outside, timid, reclusive and introspective. Until, that is, the war happens, and soldiers are billeted at the family home. Captain Tony Galloway brings love and trust into her impoverished life, and when the war ended, they marry.
Two children later, Leonora is in the kitchen alone when a tall, sombre, rather shabbily dressed man appears at the door. ‘It’s about your father’, he says. Now that the second Lady Powerstock is dead, this man, Lieutenant Tom Franklin, John’s fellow officer in the Great War, who had actually met her mother and her grandparents, is free to tell her the truth about her family, about what happened thirty-seven years ago. And it’s this key witness who takes up the story in Part 2.
Feeling acutely the loss of his friend, John, Franklin jumps at the chance to convalesce in the Powerstock ancestral home, but nothing there fits with expectation. Everyone seems awash with carefully guarded secrets: John’s father hiding himself from the world in self-imposed exile in his study; his stepmother behaving with abandonment and contempt of Lord Powerstock; his beautiful wife pregnant by another man. The whole edifice of ancient British honour, and what John was fighting for, seem a sham. And yet images of John, the rightful heir to this place, seem to haunt Tom everywhere, awake or asleep.
Then the murder of a thoroughly unlikeable American guest of Lady Powerstock precipitates Tom into the role of prime suspect. But the police, under pressure from powerful sources, choose instead to brand an innocent convalescing officer who has taken his own life, as the murderer. Officially case closed, but Tom needs to know the truth – besmirching a reputation, even posthumously, goes totally against the grain. What he finds is intrigue and deception beyond his wildest imaginings; truths the family simply can’t afford to have unearthed.
Leonora takes back the narrative in Part 3. Now in possession of the facts behind her existence from this surviving witness, she has questions of her own to pursue. How did she end up in the care of the Powerstocks? Who really was the murderer of the odious American guest? What other secrets are still to be revealed? The Powerstock’s family solicitor refuses to give her answers. Tom Franklin has vanished without trace … until, that is, she receives an eerie posthumous message from him fifteen years later.
Leonora’s husband … then Olivia, Lady Powerstock, add their evidence … then the murderer himself …. and a scruffy painter in Cornwall! Each time, just as you feel you are grasping the truth, another witness snatches it away, takes you down a different path. Immensely clever plotting and elegant writing. Indeed, its the kind of devilishly convoluted plot that makes you want to go back, with the benefit of hindsight, and read it again just to marvel at its cleverness and see the clues you missed. But at nearly 400 pages of densely packed text that’s a rather daunting prospect.
For me, personally, reading In Pale Batallions, there was something more than exquisite writerly skill on display. It’s many many years since I first discovered Robert Goddard’s Past Caring, which has remained top of my 100 favourite books. He is a past master at taking the reader deep into a story that just keeps on unravelling. But this time I entered more profoundly into my uncle’s death on the Somme than I ever have before. With his death only ‘presumed’, my mother used to dream of one day seeing him walking down the street. 
In Captain John Hallows it felt as if he was walking off the page. And it seemed so very appropriate to be feeling this precisely 1006 years later.
Not only so, but curiously enough the story also takes Leonora to the Isle of Wight, where my father’s family come from, as well as the West Country, where I grew up, and Goddard’s hauntingly familiar descriptions of those quaint houses and narrow streets transported me there too. Bewitching.
HIV/AIDS in fiction – but not mine!
I’m one of those irritating people who can’t function in a clutter, and that’s nowhere more apparent than in my writing life. I need to clear up any unresolved issues and outstanding tasks before I can psyche myself into the creative zone.
This week I’ve been flitting from an intriguing system for finding new readers (yawn, yawn), to consolidating material for the children’s Christmas story (great fun!), preparing for forthcoming author appearances (mmm, lovely communication with real live people), and delving into the ethical dimensions behind ongoing medical questions (round and round and round, we go). Oh, and a little bit of digging into the past in our family and communicating with archivists – related to Remembrance Day and my Uncle Harold who died on the Somme a hundred years ago this year. 
All in all a very raggy kind of week. And definitely not conducive to serious stints of writing.
So, I’m busy tidying up loose ends to put me in a calmer place. Not exactly headline news, not remotely interesting to anyone else, indeed, so I’ll just share one activity with you that closed – nay, more like permanently deleted – one of the many open files in my brain.
In my stack of ideas for possible future novels I have a wallet labelled ‘HIV/AIDS’, so when I saw a review of Tell the Wolves I’m Home I just had to buy a copy. I read it over a year ago but somehow never got round to writing about it here. This seems like a good moment to rectify that omission.
It’s a debut novel by Carol Rifka Brunt, an American writer now living in Devon, who was selected for the New Writing Partnership’s New Writing Ventures award, and funded by the Arts Council to write it. Lucky woman, huh?
Essentially, it’s a well written tale of love and compassion, secrets and prejudice, forbidden relationships and the legacies left by bittersweet memories.
The narrator is a fourteen year old girl, June Elbus, the younger sister of the slimmer and more beautiful Greta. June is a curious mixture as she hovers on the brink of adulthood: still fantasising about the Middle Ages and wolves, playing like a child in the woods, one minute; showing a maturity beyond her years as she faces death and loss, tortured by her own inappropriate longings, the next.
The girls’ Uncle Finn is a famous artist and he’s painting a picture of the sisters, hoping to complete it before he dies of AIDS. June is obsessed by Finn Weiss, who is also her godfather – in love with him in fact – and his death devastates her. But Finn has made provision for her grief in the shape of his hidden lover, Toby, who materialises unexpectedly at the funeral and becomes very much part of her secret world. Gradually June gets to see the impact Toby had on the uncle she thought she knew.
The Elbus family are riven with tensions arising from Finn’s fame, his illness, Mom’s reaction to it, Toby’s part in it, Greta’s insecurity, the parents’ ambitions, sibling rivalries. Jealousies, conflicts, and divided loyalties drive them to re-examine their lives, their strengths and weaknesses. Greta is not the confident, popular older sister June thought she was. Finn is not the man June thinks he is. The painting is not revered as a masterpiece should be.
In a former life I actually carried out empirical research in the early days of HIV/AIDS, and Brunt’s portrayal of the family’s reaction to the illness rings true for the time. It’s sensitively and sympathetically wrought. So too are the dynamics of the Elbus family. I liked the way the author gradually unravelled the characters and showed us their true selves – cleverly done through the eyes of an adolescent first person narrator. It’s a multi-layered book, successfully weaving and merging many threads until the tale is told. A worthy winner of a prestigious award.
But the time for writing a novel on the subject myself is passed; all my books on the subject can be consigned to a good cause. That potential novel can be crossed off my list. Result? Space on my shelves and in my brain! Wahey!!
At the Going Down of the Sun
My uncle Harold lies somewhere in France, killed in the battle of the Somme. Well, actually ‘missing presumed dead’. His name is carved at the top of a list on the Thiepval memorial on the site.
He was 21 years of age. Much the same age as the main characters in At the Going Down of the Sun by Elizabeth Darrell which I’ve just finished reading. And in a way he has come alive for me through this epic tale of World War I.
It’s not a book for the faint-hearted – either in size (a doorstopper at 591 densely typed pages) or in content. But look past the horrible cover and occasional grammatical lapses and it’s well worth the effort.
The Sheridan boys were born into wealth and property, but they grow up deprived of the love of parents. Roland is the steady responsible eldest, surrogate father to his brothers, looking forward to the life of a respected surgeon, enjoying his beloved horses and the family estate. Rex is the handsome fun-loving middle one, besotted with aeroplanes, who soon becomes a hero, an ace pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. Christopher is both beautiful and academically brilliant, but after his very first five minute fumble in the dark, he is forced into a teenage marriage to preserve the honour of the local doctor’s daughter, Marion, who seduced him.
But fate has very different plans in store for them when first their father commits suicide in Madeira, and then Britain goes to war. All three suffer unspeakable horrors. Their minds as well as their bodies are ravaged.
Nineteen year old Chris enlists to escape the nightmare of his marriage. But his brilliant mind and deficient eyesight are wholly unsuited to life as a soldier where ‘danger had become almost a friend; bullets whistled past their nonchalance as an accepted part of each day.’ The sight of his friend minus half a head, and the homosexual overtures of a close colleague, coupled with the terror of the Gallipoli landing, drive him to the very edge of insanity.
As he walks towards a ‘certain-death’ assignment he is ‘filled with anguish of knowing a man’s mind and senses counted for nothing. It was his body that was valued – by girls who longed for physical conquest, by men whose desires were perverted, by war leaders who wanted a figurehead for doomed men. For nineteen years he had revelled in the philosophies of wisdom, the refinements of culture, the language of beauty, and the infinite complexity of profundity. Yet, in the end, it seemed all he was was a bag of hay.’
Chris’ psychiatric illness forces his elder brother Roland to enlist in spite of his conscience. His experience is of medicine in the trenches, boys rotting and losing their minds before his very eyes. There’s the occasional heroic deed: performing a tracheostomy using a bayonet and a gas whistle. But mostly it’s pure drudgery: foot-rot, dysentery, infected rat-bites, shell-shock, trench fever, even measles, and all this trapped in claustrophobic earth dugouts just a few feet wide, that fill up with waist high slimy water when ‘the non-stop drenching cold rain of approaching winter’ sets in. He is utterly exhausted, filthy, infested with body lice, demoralised himself, but the work is relentless, every day a living nightmare.
‘The noise was a non-stop pressure on ear-drums and senses – the whine and crump of heavy shells, the whistle of mortar-mines, the steady crack of rifle-fire, the clangour of the gas-gong, the tortured screams of men. Thick smoke everywhere, flying earth and other indescribable fragments, the silent choking killer that penetrated men’s lungs and left them to die slowly and agonisingly, The excited commands in high boyish voices as subalterns prepared to repulse a bayonet attack; the gruffer roar of experienced N.C.O’s (sic) as they repeated the commands. The oaths, the profanities, the careless bravado, the stifled fear, the cries for help, the sobbing over a slaughtered friend: all these were part of the real battle, Roland discovered.’
The middle son is daredevil Rex who quickly notches up an outstanding tally of deaths (human and aeroplane). He’s a legend and a hero to most of his colleagues and compatriots. He’s feted by the public at home. He gets the girl everyone desires. But underneath the bravado he is a tortured soul. When he’s challenged and condemned by a group of crusading women, he realises they ‘had no notion of the sadness and anxiety he had suffered over his poor young brother, or the anguish of seeing friends sizzling into piles of blackened flesh. … Did they have nightmares and wake up in a sweat? Did they have to live a pretence and hide the terrible truth?’
This book takes us closer to that truth. We feel the enormity of what happened in those grim years, 1914-1918, when my uncle lost his life. The extreme youth of those poorly trained combatants. The rudimentary machines and technology. The effect of repeated loss. The fate of conscientious objectors.
I was forcibly reminded of my visits to the war graves in France. Standing silent before those tombstones. The ones that simply state: ‘A soldier – known unto God’. Shocked and saddened. Moved to tears.
During his time at the front Roland Sheridan writes a series of letters graphically describing his experiences. They – and this whole book – are ‘really a cry to the next generation never to let this happen again.’ It’s a gripping and emotional read and I highly recommend it.