Rain (2 page)

On a sunny morning in August the parade ground is full. Young men and women in dark blue stand nervously, fiddling with their belts and caps and swords, making sure there is no fluff or dust on them. ‘Right, brace up. Show the movement!’ barks a voice. All fiddling ceases, and caps are put on hurriedly as more and more butterflies make them nauseous. The academy sergeant major, with rapid screams that their bodies seem to hear before their ears, petrifies them from nervy fidgeting to poised, chest-out attention. Not long now. Two minutes to march onto the parade. Colour sergeants, who have spent every day of the last year breaking these men and women into military service, take a last inspection, going past the rows and making last adjustments, like tigers licking dirt off their cubs. One of them stops at a cadet with straw-coloured hair and whispers to him, ‘Well, Mr fuckin’ Chamberlain, who’d ha’ thought it? Next time I see ye I’m goin’ to have tae call you sir.’

‘That so, Colour Sergeant?’

‘Aye, but it don’t mean ah’m goin’ tae enjoy it. Or fuckin’ mean it, ye little wretch.’ He grins fondly and moves on. The cadet and his friends laugh but are quickly silenced by his mock-serious glare. Thirty seconds left.

The academy sergeant major shouts, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, in my regiment we have a motto: “
Quis Separabit?
” It means, for those ignorant pikeys of you unfortunate enough not to have had a classical education –’ he waits for the laughter to die before continuing ‘– it means, “Who shall separate us?”
Just remember that. Every day of your lives. After this year no one, nothing, can separate you. Be you in Afghanistan or Iraq or Kosovo, or whichever next shithole it is that Her Majesty decrees that you go to in order that you might lead her men, if you live to be a hundred or if you die tomorrow no one can break the bond you have forged this year.’ He pauses to let it sink in. He sees them all thrust out their chests an extra inch. He loves military theatre. ‘Now, march to the beat of the drum, get on the heel, hold your heads high; today you are kings of all you survey.’ Pulses quicken, sweat trickles down necks. A band strikes up, and they march onto the parade ground.

Fifteen minutes later they stand immaculate as the band plays the ‘Radetzky March’, and an elderly retired general totters around inspecting the rows of cadets, mere hours away from joining their regiments as fully fledged junior officers. The general looks at them with envy – for their youth, for their straight backs and lean faces – but with sadness as well. Some of these boys and girls will not be alive in a year. As he passes the ranks of puffed chests and neat, clipped hair he looks at them and thinks of his own friends who are no longer alive and remembers his own commissioning parade. He sighs with tiredness and regret as he completes his inspection and shuffles his way back to the dais to begin his address.

The cadet with straw-coloured hair cannot stop himself from smiling, breaking the pattern of stern arrogance on everyone else’s faces. He has freckles on his nose, and raises his chin so sharply that he seems three inches more than his five feet nine. He sees his mother in the crowd, wearing a hat so large that those behind her are hidden entirely from view, and his smile breaks into a grin, which he quickly suppresses.

In the crowd he can also see a wheelchair, its occupant’s
chest sparkling with medals hovering over a gap where legs should be. His mind suddenly moves away from the parade ground and far away to Afghanistan. The sweat that trickles down his neck now is not from heat. He glances back at his mother, almost to check that she is still there, and this time he doesn’t smile. A sadness comes over him.

They begin the slow march past. As they wheel across the parade ground in unbroken line, he can feel the fragility of his friends’ flesh as they press against each other.

He sighs. No turning back.

Who is this boy, with his dancing eyes?

Tom Chamberlain was born to fight in Afghanistan. That does not mean that he was a natural soldier, although he became a very good one; simply that the circumstances of his family history, birth and upbringing meant that for him joining the British Army was an absolute inevitability. Just as when a boy kicks a ball in a garden it is only going one place, smack bang through a window, so his mother acknowledged the moment he put on his father’s old army helmet aged four and started to march around his bedroom that he would end up, not just in the army but in a war with it.

As a boy he was never happier than when playing soldiers. Gardens were the Burmese jungle, any beach was Omaha or Utah, any street Stalingrad or Caen. A simple stick would become a pistol, flame-thrower or bazooka. As a six-year-old in 1991 he ran downstairs every morning before school to watch coverage of the Gulf War. It looked amazing – Scud missiles shooting gold up through the pitch-black screen and tanks screaming through the desert – and he sat transfixed and square-eyed.

However, while he idolized the army and anyone who had served with it, an unspoken fear gnawed away that if or when
the time came and he found himself not just in a fight but with the responsibility of leading men in that fight, he would prove unequal to the task. He just didn’t think he would ever be up to leading men. How could sergeants and corporals, veterans of past conflicts, ever look to him for guidance? Would he be a popular officer, trusted and liked by his soldiers, or would they take against him? Could he cope? Always these shadowy doubts lay beneath the outward bravado.

The main shadow, the only shadow, cast over Tom’s childhood was the death of his father when he was eight. Leonard Chamberlain was a fine-looking man: tall, with a Roman nose and two uncapped chipped front teeth, giving him an oddly noble but friendly appearance. He was guilty of an aversion to hard work where charm and procrastination sufficed, and devoted himself to a blissful – if financially ruinous – life of Epicureanism. What he inherited when he was eighteen had by the time of his marriage to Constance dwindled to just enough cash to buy a farm cottage on the estate of an old army friend of his in Kent, near Chatham.

People often described Leonard as a wasted talent, and correctly, but he was more complicated than that. The army friend – Tom’s godfather Sam Hockley – and he had joined the same regiment together when they were nineteen and just out of school, and had cavorted, gambled and drunk-driven their way through service in Germany, Belize and Cyprus via a succession of hair-raising and improbable escapades, the stories of which became all the better for their frequent and ever more baroque embellishments. But one day, as he explored the attic, six-year-old Tom came across an old photograph of his father on a Belfast street corner, more angular but unmistakably him, talking urgently into a radio while a dead soldier was carried away in a body bag. Tom kept the photo in the drawer of his bedside table and would
often look at it long after he had been put to bed by his parents.

A few months later Tom was helping Sam out on the farm and, as they put some cattle feed in a trough, asked him, ‘Godfather Sam, did you and Daddy ever have to fight baddies in the army?’

Sam paused, ambushed, pondering whether to obfuscate or to tell the truth.
Bugger it, the boy would have to learn sometime
. ‘Well, you see, Tommy, and promise me not to tell your father I said this, will you?’ He waited until he received a solemn nod. ‘Your dad and I were together in a town called Belfast. And it wasn’t very nice. A lot of people were doing horrible things. And of all the people with me out there, I’d say that your dad was the bravest. He had some tough times out there, but all his men loved him, and he made sure that a lot of them got home.’

‘So was he a hero then?’

‘Yes. Yes, he was.’

‘Were you a hero?’

Sam took off his flat cap and pushed back his thinning sandy hair. ‘Well Tom, I don’t know if I was a hero. But I was certainly surrounded by them. Now, you promise me to never tell Dad what I just said, OK?’

What Sam didn’t say was that Leonard’s problems – his alcoholism and spiral into near bankruptcy – had begun just after that tour of Belfast in 1979. Sam had seen his friend change from quite a serious-minded young man into a reckless, live-for-the-minute rogue. Leonard left the army in 1981, much to the chagrin of his superiors, who were grooming him for rapid promotion, and embarked on a three-year binge which knew no bounds and certainly every casino in the West End. Three years later, his inheritance down the drain, he woke up one morning next to a girl, had decided by
lunchtime that he wanted to marry her and did so six months later.

She was Constance Rowley, a secretary at a law firm in London, heaven-sent for the undeserving Leonard. She took him out of London, away from temptation, and with Sam’s help and generosity – borne more out of irrational loyalty than financial sense – they moved into the Old Mill on his estate. Constance got a job with a firm of solicitors in Rochester, but Leonard never rediscovered the appetite for work he had once had. It was very strange. Even when Tom was born in 1985 he was disinclined to finance their lifestyle, which although comfortable was not luxurious, any further by getting a job. Constance let it stand. She slightly suspected, for one thing, that all was not well with him. As indeed it wasn’t. On Tom’s first birthday, a quiet March day with a grey clanging arch of sky hanging over the house, Leonard told her that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the liver. It was a hereditary condition, apparently, but both couldn’t help wondering whether it had been accelerated by the excesses of the past few years. They kept it very quiet and hoped desperately that Leonard would live as long as possible.

Leonard spent his days inside armed with a history book and a bottle of wine or whisky. Whenever Tom, who had only the vaguest notion of his father’s fragility, came in Leonard would look at him with a sparkle and challenge him to a game of chess or backgammon, or tell him to sit next to him as he read him passages from histories of the crusades and the fall of Byzantium. Tom didn’t fully understand but was enthralled by the exciting names and the thought of entire cities being sacked.

When the end came it was swift. Seven year after his diagnosis, Leonard deteriorated in a couple of weeks; finally his immune system abandoned its long rearguard action. Tom
was woken one morning at eight o’clock not by Constance crying but by the silence from downstairs. He tiptoed out of bed and down to the kitchen. It was all quiet; nothing had been touched. He felt the kettle. It was cold. Then he heard broken sobs from upstairs, and his fear vanished and numb realization hit him. He knew as surely then as he did a minute later when he opened the door to the bedroom that his father was dead.

The next week they buried him, Tom walking with Constance behind the coffin. There were no more tears from Constance; she had long known this was coming, and after the first shock, save for dabbing her eyes occasionally at the funeral more out of form than necessity, she did not weep. She still squeezed Tom’s hand though, all the way through the service.

‘Stop it, Mummy, you’re hurting my hand,’ he whispered.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Tommy.’ She smiled at him and relaxed her grip, but only for a moment before unconsciously squeezing it again, even more tightly this time.

After the wake, Constance ushered everyone out of the house and she and Tom sat forlornly in the kitchen, slowly getting used to the unwelcome quiet. Breaking the empty silence, as if seized with a sudden idea, Constance leaped up, went to her bedroom for a moment and came down with a letter in her hand.

‘Now Tommy, your father wanted me to give you this when you were fourteen or fifteen, but I’d like you to read it now. You should read it now, I think. You’re old enough. Daddy wrote it to you just last week. Would you like to read it by yourself? If you want to I don’t mind, but if you want me to be with you then of course I will.’

Tom’s heart felt light as she handed him the stiff ivory-white envelope, bare save for ‘To My Darling Boy’ in his father’s beautiful spidery handwriting. He gulped.

‘Um, don’t worry, Mummy. I’ll read it outside.’

Tom walked outside and Constance shut the door after him, ruffling his hair as he passed her. The letter felt heavy, heavier than the paper in it. He climbed over the fence and walked to his den, cut out of the middle of a large rhododendron. The setting sun bounced off the undersides of the leaves in yellow and gold. He fingered the envelope for some minutes, before gently prising it open. He unfolded the letter.

My Dear Tom,

Please forgive this letter. I so very much wish that I could have said all of the following to you in person. Face to face is so much better than the cold written word, but at least you will, should you want to, be able to keep this letter for a while. I am afraid that I did not talk to you before I died for two reasons. First, aged eight you are too young, I think, to deal with the concept of speaking to a man about to die, and I want to keep you young for as long as possible. You will be annoyed with me for not treating you as a grown-up, but I hope you will understand. The second reason is that I could not have brought myself to have spoken to you; I simply would not have been able to witness your reaction. So there you go; half out of concern for you, half for me. Please forgive my cowardice: I hope you understand it.

Tom, by this stage you will know all there is to know about looking after your mother and being the man of the house. I know you will have done a
superb
job, but I am just so sorry that a boy so young has had to grow up so quickly, too quickly. I know that you and your friends are impatient to grow up, but one day you will realize that it is a magical thing to stay young for as long as possible.

So I will not lecture you about looking after Mummy; you will be doing that already and as I head towards death (gosh that is strange to write!) her safety is mercifully not on my list of worries (though the
future of the English cricket team and your tree house surviving a storm are). You are a brave boy, Tom; I have always known that. Mummy may have told you that you were very ill when you were born; you actually very nearly died and the doctors and nurses had given up hope. One doctor told me, when you were at your worst, that you would not survive the night.

The next morning that doctor came and saw you. Not only were you still there but you had somehow, from the night, drawn from some great invisible reserve of strength. The doctor was amazed; no baby had ever made such a recovery in that hospital, and all the nurses after that fawned over you, saying that you were their little hero.

I wish I could have spent years and years writing this to you. I wish I could put down every single bit of advice I have ever heard myself, but I will limit myself to the following, in no particular order, but as they come into my head, apart from the last one, which is the most important advice I have ever been given. Some of it you will understand now, some you will understand later, some you will think is just rubbish!

1. The eleventh commandment. Never get caught. If you obey this one you don’t have to worry about any of the other boring ten. Apart from ‘Honour your father and mother.’ You must do that!
   
2. Always, always say please and thank you. It will amaze you how many grown-ups do not do this.
   
3. Never be rude to girls.
   
4. There is no such thing as a stupid question. If in doubt, just ask!
   
5. The ancient Greeks had a great saying, ‘Nothing in excess.’ I have no doubt that you’ll see what that means later on in life. Unfortunately, probably only because you will have done something to excess or gone too far. But learn from it!
   
6. You will do well to learn this quote from Walter Scott about the mess you will get into if you start telling lies: ‘O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!’ Never a truer word spoken.
   
7. Have a child. It is the best present in the world. But not for a few years at least!
   
8. I don’t know who said this, but like virtually every other good quotation it was probably Johnson, Wilde or Churchill. ‘The harder I work, the luckier I seem to get.’ Tom, I never worked very hard, and as you can see I haven’t been that lucky.
   
9. You were born into a family which, if not wildly wealthy, at least does not struggle. Remember to look after those who have not had the advantages of a loving family and a good education and relatively secure financial background that you have. This will become clear later in your life. You will come to understand what I mean.
   

   In terms of university, jobs, exams, etc. I have two things to say.
   

1. From me, your father. You must do very well and get a first at university. And then you must join the army, and after mastering that you must be in the cabinet, having made yourself (legally) into a multi-millionaire.
   
2. From me, Daddy. As long as you are happy, Tom, and add value even to just one other person’s happiness, do whatever you want to do. If you don’t want to go to university, don’t. If you don’t want to touch the army with a bargepole, don’t. If you don’t want to work, don’t. But always add value.
   

Goodness me, Tom, I know I will wake up tomorrow and reread this and think it is all drivel. But I don’t think it is. In any case, I am putting it in the envelope and sealing it now. I must go now; goodbyes are better short and sharp.

Tom, I do wonder how you are going to do, but I am not scared about it.

God speed, and with love, with all the love in the world to you, my brave, brave boy,

Daddy