The War At Home
We cannot call this a fairytale. There are no lost glass slippers, and no Prince Charming. No one eats any kind of poisoned fruit, and there are no evil stepmothers to be seen. This story will not be remembered in years to come, and it won’t be anthologised alongside other traditional tales of love and loss. Instead, it will eventually disappear. Soon there will be no one left to remember it, but maybe that’s appropriate. Maybe the best stories are the ones too personal to be remembered by anyone but those who lived them.
Meeting you was not fate. Two friends who thought we’d ‘make a smashing pair’ set us up. Luckily for them, we did. You liked my honesty, and I liked the way your hair curled around your ears. We quickly settled down with the notion that we’d both met the person we’d spend the rest of our lives with. We spent our weekends dancing besides your gramophone.
After two years spent together, you went to my father and asked his permission to marry me. With his blessing, you got down on one knee and asked me to be your wife. I couldn’t understand why you’d even taken the time to ask, there was no one else I’d rather be with. There was talk of a War on the way – we sat around the wireless and listened to Asquith talk gravely about the ‘current situation’. It had nothing to do with us though; we were encapsulated in our own love-filled bubble, planning a wedding that had no space for the horrors our Prime Minister warned us of.
But the War did break out, and with it came a mass hysteria from all the women in the village. In retrospect, I realise I wasn’t there for you. I let those women goad you into signing up, and, sickeningly, I felt proud when you came home wearing your new uniform. You saluted me and I laughed because at the time, it wasn’t real. After all, this was going to be a short war – you’d be home for Christmas, and then I would be your wife. ‘A white wedding,’ you said, ‘what fun!’
The day you left, I walked with you to the station. There was an air of excitement as we approached the train and from every corner there was exhilarated chatter. I found myself feeling awkward. I was nervous of the inevitable moment that was approaching; the ‘goodbye’. Instead of laughing alongside the other women who had come to see their men off, I grew quiet. I’d changed my mind and I didn’t want you to go. I think you sensed how I felt; you’d always been good at reading people’s emotions, especially mine. So, instead of saying the word that I’d come to dread, you bundled me into your arms, gave me the tightest hug in the world and whispered, ‘If love was enough, I’d still be here with you’. And before I knew it, you were gone.
You didn’t leave England immediately. Instead you were taken to a training camp near the coast where you learnt how to clean guns and kill humans. Your letters told me of early starts and of men you’d grown fond of. You referred to your friends as ‘comrades’. After a few weeks, you finally left England for France. I don’t know where exactly as your letters were heavily censored, but I could sense that you felt prepared; ‘They tell me it will be a case of do or die. As far as I’m concerned, I’m not prepared to die – not when I know you are home waiting for me’, you wrote.
Whilst I thought of you every second of every day, life continued without you. The men were gone, and the women were left behind to fill the gaps they had created. My father had been a wealthy land owner and I naively saw myself as ‘a true woman of the countryside’, and so I worked on the land. I worked until my hands grew rough and calloused, until dirt became a permanent stain under my nails, until I was no longer overwhelmed by your absence. The work exhausted me, as did the persistent cough that had settled in my lungs, which I chose to ignore.
Christmas came and went with no sign of the War ending. Every week there were more men lost. Soon they weren’t just names I read in newspapers that I shook my head in sadness too. Soon they were men I knew personally; a cousin, a friend’s husband, a school friend. The list grew, as did my fear for you. The letters from you sounded strained, as if you were hiding something from me. You gave no mention to battles you were going into; instead you focused on the food and the men. In response, I wrote to you and told you of the people that had died and of the horror I felt. Your responses were the same; ‘Poor sod’. You weren’t surprised, which was telling.
The letters grew more and more despondent as time went on. You spoke of mud that reached your knees; of rain that hit the very core of your being; of the men you lost by the day. ‘I put one foot in front of the other,’ you wrote, ‘that is how I survive’. I worried for you in those months. I tried to remember the life we had led before, the sound of your laugh. But the words you wrote eventually clouded my memory. ‘If I die, make sure my mum lets my old school friends know, ‘If I die, don’t let them send my uniform back home’. ‘If I die’ became a regular fixture within your letters, which I would counteract with ‘when you get home’. I cried often, but then again, so did most of the women. The dark evenings were spent worrying about our men, and knitting socks. I knitted a lot of socks.
It came as a great shock to me when I collapsed whilst working on the land one day. I’d worked until I didn’t feel anything anymore – including the fever and the muscle aching. I’d assumed they were a result of too much fresh air. It came as an even greater shock when I coughed so hard that my white handkerchief turned red. Of course, the biggest shock was hearing the doctor’s telling my mother there was no more they could do for me.
‘She’s had Consumption for months, I don’t understand why she didn’t come earlier,’ he said over the sobs that erupted from my mother’s lips, ‘She’s now got Pneumonia, she doesn’t stand a chance’. By this point, I could no longer open my eyes, and my lips had sealed themselves shut, unable to shout at the bitter, War-numb doctor who had been so callous with my mother’s heartbreak. It only took a few hours. With alarming speed, I was gone.
When you didn’t receive a letter from me for two months you were angry. You couldn’t understand it – there you were fighting for your country, fighting for me, and I didn’t have to time to send you anything to make you believe you hadn’t died and gone to hell. Was it so much to ask of me? Five lines would have sufficed, just to let you know that there was a world outside the blood, the unbearable noises, the death. You fought with added anger in those weeks. You ran towards the enemy with extra passion, you thrust bayonets with extra vigour. You saw me in the eyes of all the men you killed. An animalistic sense of drive descended on you, and I watched you with helpless terror as you flung yourself in front of the guns of our opponents.
Eventually word arrived from my father. I held your hand as you opened it, though of course you couldn’t feel it. I watched your eyes as the words smashed into you. I heard the low moan that escaped from your chapped, war-ridden lips. And I felt your pain, because it was my pain too. It came from the core and surrounded us both in a blood-red cloud of heartbreak.
You were offered bereavement leave, but you refused. I had expected this – we both agreed that a body was just a body. It was difficult to watch you grieve alone, amongst all the rats and the mud. You couldn’t escape death because it hung in the air, rank and stale. We’d accommodated for the idea that you might die, I could even go as far as to say we’d accepted it, but for me to die instead seemed so crude and unnecessary.
You saw me in every reflection. In the muddy puddle you sank into when Jack got his face blown off. In the gun you polished before you went over the top. When eventually it stopped raining, the clouds formed themselves into the curves of my body. You distracted yourself by the simple things; eating, cleaning, breathing, fighting. I sat in the corners of your trench and watched.
Of course, the War ended and you had to return home to a world that didn’t involve me. You visited my parents once, but their grey faces were too much for you to bear and so you didn’t go again, which I understood. You never went to my grave; instead you picked flowers that reminded you of me. I watched your life continue despite the fact that mine had stopped so abruptly. It took time, but the pain of losing me so unexpectedly started to subdue. You found a new job in a post office and for the first time in a long time you were surrounded by people whose last four years did not completely mirror your own. It was therapeutic for you. The first time you laughed again, I cried with happiness.
Eventually, there was another woman. I’d readied myself for the moment another girl made your eyes light up, but I won’t pretend it wasn’t hard to watch. I suppose if I’d still had a breath, this is what would have knocked it out of me. In a way, it helped to know how much you hated yourself for it. I could feel how much that hate consumed you. It ate you up inside, and all that was left was your heart hanging in the empty cage of your body. I was selfish.
She seemed nice. She was deserving of your affections, and I suppose I resigned myself to the fact that if anyone was going to have you, she would ‘do’. At first it was hard to watch you lead her down the path that we had stood at the beginning of. I stayed away from you on the wedding day. I busied myself by watching my parents. They had grown old in such a short space of time. The grief that surrounded their house was overpowering. Nature had played them a dirty trick; they weren’t supposed to outlive their only daughter.
After your first child was born, I decided it was time to stop. Just because my life had ended, it didn’t mean yours had too. Of course, for a while it had halted for you, and for a while it had felt like it might never start again. But it did. She brought you back to life, and I could only feel gratitude towards her for that.
We still collide sometimes. You walk through me and I still manage to knock the breath out of you. I don’t do it often, but occasionally, I can’t help it. Occasionally, I need to remind you that once upon a time you loved another girl. Another girl who, if love had been enough, would still be with you.
We cannot call this a tragedy. There was laughter again. New families and new babies. It wasn’t unbearable forever. The pain dulled. I won’t say it was ever forgotten, but it became less suffocating, less soul-destroying. There was contentment. There was even happiness. And most of all, most importantly, eventually there was love again.
