The First of July (33 page)

Frank, Devon, 1919

I
WANTED TO LEAVE DEVON
but didn’t know how I might live in London again. So I lingered on with Dad. I had wanted to emerge as a different man, but the man I was now was no good any more for heavy work, nor for standing serving in a shop.

The months went by and the war seemed to be drawing to an end, and I seemed to be slipping back into the mire of the life I’d been so proud to leave years ago. Nobody was interested in my time in London or what I had learned. Most seemed to think I was as lucky to have escaped the big city as to return alive from France, both being, in their eyes, places where the enemy lurked. I gave a hand to Dad, trying the fine work on the coffins. The heavy stuff was too much for me now, and we had a strong lad in for that. Jim. He hadn’t got any kind of eye, just brawn, and I’d have to hold my tongue when he heaved in the wrong wood or ruined a beautiful bit of timber by not thinking before he went charging in at it with his chisel. I wasn’t unhappy all the time, but I longed for London like some man might long for a girl, and what I wanted most was not what you’d expect, not the great domes and spires and galleries, nor even the amusement parks and Sunday bands and music halls, but the ordinary things: the smell of gas in the Institute, the rush of people crossing Westminster Bridge so sure of the city that they didn’t even look at it. I missed the tang of smoke and the noise of hansoms and drays and cars. The bells, the shouts, the rattle and roar of coal down the chute. You’d think after France I’d want the peace of Devon, but I longed for noise.

Dad and Jim were all right together and the business was surviving, though never what it used to be. The old man was tetchy because even though folks were still dying and doing it at home and even though some other coffin-makers had failed in the war, he worried and fussed and spent hours over his books as if by adding up the same figures again they might suddenly show a different truth. Yet he’d take no suggestions for expanding, nor even for letting me do the figures in the modern way as they did in London shops. I tried to tell him business was business, no matter what goods it dealt in, but he wouldn’t have it.

I sometimes wondered what had happened to Connie. But what did Connie know? She’d have had me in prison like Isaac Meyer’s brother, being taunted by warders and attacked by prisoners while other lads died for me. Thinking of Isaac, I remembered my promise to write to his family and I remembered it with shame. As I was identified as Isaac for a while, as I
was
Isaac in the rabbi’s eyes, perhaps they had been told, at first, that he was only injured. My resurrection was his end. How its significance had escaped me, I do not know—thinking only of myself, I expect.

I remembered the simple address, of course. So I took my time on a letter and I was careful to leave out a lot and add a lot more and, by the time I’d finished, Isaac’s death was the best you could hope for. Almost glorious, but not so as they’d wonder why he’d been passed over for a medal and make inquiries. But he
was
a hero, really, in his way, but not as anyone who’d not been there would think. I said as how I’d been injured and was not fit for work and if I’d been in London as I’d hoped, I’d have come to see them and told them face to face. It was probably true, that bit.

And so things went on in the coffin corps. Low morale. The C.O. failing, the crippled adjutant exasperated and drinking, the trooper a general dogsbody dreaming of his sweetheart. Sometimes I felt pretty desperate. I was useless, unwanted, really, and, to tell the truth, lonely, as I never had been in London.

It must have been the end of 1917 we got two strokes of luck. The first began with the old vicar of Thaxton. He was a widower who’d never recovered from when his boy—an officer in the artillery—had been killed on the Somme around about the same time I’d been injured. He’d sacrificed himself for another officer. “Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life, etc.” It was all very biblical. He’d gotten a medal.

But there was no consoling the father, and a rumor at the Arms said after that it had been nothing but hours of Old Testament, death, and destruction and the flightier members of his flock had gone off to neighboring villages or even Chapel for all they were sorry about his boy. At which point the bishop intervened. Still, the reverend was past all his woe now and to be buried next to his wife, who’d died two years back.

Dad and I went to see the daughter, Miss Chatto. She was a nice young lady, very sad. Then it hit me. Chatto was the officer who’d come to Duke Street and had got me in with the Hunts cyclists. He’d said he came from Devon. It wouldn’t have been right to ask if he was “my” Chatto, so I didn’t. Anyway, he didn’t make it back.

Miss Chatto was talking about how she didn’t want anything showy for her father, him being a modest man of the cloth, but she said it should be nice. So nice we did: polished elm, and a good bit of wood, with a touch of mitering and handles in the classical style. There was no money in it: you could tell she had little, so we did it almost at cost and out of respect. Poor Miss Letitia Chatto had lost her father and her brother and her fiancé as well, Jim heard, a Navy man.

But it was as if God was watching and judging, because a few weeks later we got a good commission from the widow of the mayor, who, it turned out, was in the way of being the Reverend Chatto’s sister-in-law and had heard good of us from the daughter. Only the best would do, she said, even if the old man had heard down in the Arms that she was part German, though you couldn’t tell.

“Guilt,” said my dad. “It’s always guilt when nothing but the best will do.”

The coffin would lie in state in the town hall (Dad snorted on hearing this; he’d never been one for the mayor), then borne through the streets. The whole of Totnes would see it. Trouble was, we didn’t have much of the best left.

“Where’s that fine oak we had way back?” I said. “We had a whole lot of it we bought off a timber merchant back in ’09 or ’10.” When things were going well, was what I didn’t say. It was lovely, fine-grained, seasoned timber. When Mother died, he’d used some for her coffin.

“No,” said Dad, a bit too quick. “Long gone.”

But I didn’t see as how it could be. Even then, rich customers, or guilty ones by Dad’s reckoning, were few and far between. And he looked shifty.

I let him go out drinking down the Arms by himself. And no sooner had he gone than I went out to rummage through the sheds. I was damned if I wasn’t going to find the oak, though I had my suspicions that he’d gone and sold it. At a loss, no doubt. Moving the planks of cut lengths was hard work, where once it would have been nothing, and I didn’t find anything but elm and pine. There was a lean-to right at the back, but I didn’t see that he would have put valuable wood in there. It was just used for offcuts and logs and bits of old rubbish he could never bear to give away. But he used to keep a couple of made-up cheap coffins in there in case of emergencies. It was worth a look. Ivy hung down like curtains in front of the doors, and I could get only one fully open. But I slipped inside, glad I’d brought a lamp. There was a coffin shell standing upright without its lid, a flimsy thing, and a stack of planks. I moved the coffin and took down the top planks and directed my light behind.

The light found oak almost immediately; I could tell by the color and the grain even though it was half in shadow. I could see that this was a coffin. Made up, finished. I lifted the lamp higher. A perfect, beautiful coffin. I took more planks away, getting out of breath, and then squeezed past the remainder. The coffin was carefully balanced on trestles. I touched it, and it was smooth and waxed. I could see its pale shape clearly, but I set the lamp by it to stare at the delicate inlay, the lozenges set into the side, the hand-cut beading, and the chamfered lid edge. The handles were splayed in the shape of acanthus leaves. I touched them; they were solid brass. It was a masterwork.

What on earth was such a piece doing stored in here? Why on earth hadn’t Dad said? And when had he made it—if it was him, and who else could it have been; nobody had these skills now—and how on earth had he ever afforded the materials? How the hell long had it taken him? Longer than any corpse might wait for it, I thought. Then as I ran my hand over the lid, so pleasing to touch because of the layers of wax and polish, I touched the edge of a coffin plate and bent over to see it in more detail. It was brass, too, and I saw it had a name on it, and dates set within a finely etched wreath of laurel. I lifted the lamp and leaned forward, feeling my skin tingle a little.

Francis Percy Stanton, August 18, 1891–July 1, 1916

RIP

The lamp went out, and I stood there in the darkness for a long while. Nothing is ever as you believe it to be.

So we soldiered on, Dad and I and the lad (who learned to make good, basic coffins in the end). Dad got older and more tired, and I got older and more resigned. Anyway, the old man liked us living together, and I liked it well enough; or at least I had grown used to it and he needed me. I saw that now. I never said a word to him about what I’d seen that night.

The Armistice came and went and I was trotted out with all the other village lads who’d served. Even poor Wilf Gates, whose brother brought him to the Arms in his chair. They’d carry him in and there he’d sit by the bar, dribbling a bit and having his special drink in his old mug. It looked like ale but wasn’t, on account of his light-headedness. Now they pinned his campaign medal to his chest, over his bib. There was bunting in the church hall, and tea and music and kissing.

All the while, there was another enemy creeping from the Continent. Not so long after the Armistice, we both caught the Spanish flu, Dad and me. It was a bitter thing that just as there were plenty of deaths and all close at hand, he should fall ill himself. Jim nursed us both, sometimes with his girl helping: an odd sort of family we were by then—and I came through, but Dad slipped away at Christmas. He was sixty-eight years old, and he’d probably had enough.

I went out the next day and found the coffin. My coffin. In daylight, it was as fine as I remembered, and I found I was shaking a little. This time I lifted the lid and found it lined with quilted ivory silk and tiny silk-covered buttons and the top edge fitted with brass studs. A pillow in the same silk. I levered off the nameplate and took it to keep as a testament. Then I took one of our stock plates and I cut a new one for him, though his one for me had been far better work. Then I called Mr. Rook the undertaker.

Jim was set to marry at Easter, and his girl’s father was a farmer in need of a strong hand, and I was fitter every day but at a loss with Dad gone. I had no interest in the coffin business, and anyway these days you could buy a coffin from Manchester or Bristol, ready-made, for half the price. That was the dark shadow that had lain over Dad in his last years. The great funerals were a thing of the past, the coffin was soon in the ground and the demand for bespoke wasn’t there.

One summer morning I sat with my beer, with nothing to do as usual but rub at the tender lump that had appeared under my armpit, knowing it was one of Nora’s steel ribs pushing through.

I had read in the newspaper the day before that the recent Tour de France, the first since the war, had been a shambles. A Belgian, Firmin Lambot, had won it in the slowest time ever. It wasn’t Lambot’s fault. They said it was the roads, blown apart by the war, but it wasn’t the roads, it was all that had happened. Where were the gods? Where were Petit-Breton, Lapize, and Faber? Gone. Lambot was racing against ghosts.

There was a knock at the door. I got up slowly; even if it was for a coffin, I could scarcely be bothered. But it was the postman with a single letter. It was postmarked London, and the writing was black and untidy. Early on, I’d had a letter from Mr. Nugent. He was sorry to hear of my injuries, he said, and said Mr. Quickseed and Jakob sent their regards. Albert had retired, as his eyesight was too poor, and Joe was gone, he said, but it was hard to tell if he meant to the Army or the hereafter or another position in men’s outfitting. They had two young ladies who’d taken our positions, he continued, and they were most satisfactory. The weather was very fine. Mr. Nugent’s letter had made me depressed; how many uniforms were hanging under dust sheets in “unclaimed” now?

There’d not been a word from anyone since then, and the writing I was looking down at was certainly not Mr. Nugent’s elegant copperplate of which he was so proud. It was more like a lunatic might write. But the letter, two pages of it on thin paper, turned out to be from Isaac Meyer’s brother, Samuel. Now that the war was over and he was out of prison, he had been grateful to know the details of his brother’s death and my comments about him and knowing that he had not suffered. Isaac had written of me several times, said Samuel Meyer, and our ideological exchanges had been important to his brother in keeping a wider vision of the world and the greater struggle even as it sank into an abyss. He didn’t know how I was fixed for work, having been injured, but though he could offer me no money to speak of, he and some comrades had a house in Stepney that had once been his parents’, where several young men and a few women now lived together, sharing what they had, be it money or abilities. They had a small printing press. He would be happy if I would join their community. They were working to change the world through public speaking, political action, and international understanding, he said. We would educate each other and then educate the masses. Wars such as the war just past were possible only because of ignorance and distrust between working men—and women, he’d squeezed in above the line—who should be brothers. The enemy was not Germans or Hungarians or Turks but the conspiracy of the privileged, the rich and the powerful across all our countries, and that fight was only just beginning.

In truth, though I went along with the first bit, I didn’t really go along with the second. Some of the best officers I’d known had been sons of great families, and you’d only relish a further scrap if you hadn’t been part of the last one. Nor were my times with his brother exactly conversations. As I recalled, apart from in London when I’d heard him deliver his talk on “The Conditions of the Working Man in Russia” (so nobody gives a fig about the women, I remember Connie saying), we mostly talked about cycles and the weather in training, and in France we just looked out for each other. He was my friend.