Then, with the coming of spring, they left Italy and made for the South of France, where, rumour had it, the Americans were landing. For weeks, they were looked after by the French Resistance – the “Maquis” they were called – then handed over to the Americans. From Marseilles, Les and his friends were shipped back to England, to Liverpool. There, Les was able to go home for a week’s leave. When Les walked back into the village, no one could believe their eyes. He had been reported as dead, missing in action, two years before. After the war, Les worked for the rest of his life on farms all around, on ours too for a while. He suffered health issues all his life on account of his time as a prisoner of war. Read Billy the Kid, and you will get to know him a bit, just as you will get to know my uncles.
And you will also meet Uncle Mac, for Billy is Mac too. In fact, he is more Uncle Mac than anyone else. Mac was a family friend, always kind and gentle, never judgemental. A real friend and support to a young boy trying to grow up and find his feet in the world, and he was funny too. But he was sad as well – I could see that in his face sometimes. I didn’t know why till I was much older, old enough, I suppose, to be told such things. There were times, I knew, when I went to see Mac and Edna, his wife, and their family, when Mac would not be there. He was a physiotherapist, and a good one too. But for reasons I did not understand, he was sometimes away for weeks at a time. And no one spoke of him then, which I knew was strange.
I must have been maybe twelve or thirteen when at last I learned why Mac was often not there. He was sick, I was told. He had a drink problem. He was an alcoholic. Then I was told how and why the illness had begun. It seems that in the war, Mac had been a young soldier in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He had been in one of the very first ambulances to drive into Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp (the camp where Anne Frank had died only weeks before the camp was liberated), where it was discovered that thousands upon thousands of people, Jews and others, had been kept in the most appalling conditions. The British soldiers who first entered that camp were faced with unimaginable horrors, thousands dead, thousands dying, and Mac had to try with the others to look after them, bury them. It was a horror that was to haunt him for the rest of his life. The drink helped him forget, but in time he could not live without it.
Writing all these life stories into the making of Billy, I wrote my story, wrote it fast, his character coming more alive in my head with every word I wrote. But then, try as I did, I could not find a way to end his story. Somehow, the life of the old soldier had to end up back in Chelsea – after all, that was where I had seen that old Chelsea pensioner. I could not figure out how to do it, not without contriving something that was forced, and therefore impossible for me to believe. To write a story, I have to first believe absolutely in it, in the characters, in how the story plays out. I must never make things happen, never play God. It is always a difficult line to draw. I like my stories to grow organically out of the characters and the situations they find themselves in, that they have created. I want the characters to find their own way towards the denouement. I try not to impose one, try not to create a neat ending, but to let the ending happen, to surprise myself with it. With Billy the Kid, this didn’t seem to be happening. I was stuck.
I don’t know why but time and again when I get stuck, something happens, always something totally unexpected that shines a new light on the story. In the case of Billy the Kid, that occurred in France at a literary festival in Aix-en-Provence.
I hadn’t wanted to go. I wanted to finish my Billy the Kid story, the one I couldn’t finish. But I had to go. I had promised. So, when I had done my talk at the festival, there I was, having supper in a country inn just outside the town with all the other writers from the festival. They all spoke French loudly and very fast, and I was quite tired. My hostess took pity on me and introduced me in English to her husband across the table. “Here’s one of the men I live with,” she said, laughing. “He is my husband.” “And who is the other one?” I asked. Her husband spoke up. “He is not here,” he replied. “He likes to stay at home.” And then he told me this story by way of explanation – so that there should be no misunderstanding, he said.
It seems that five years before, this couple had bought a plot of land just outside the town of Aix, and they had built a house there at weekends, just the two of them, which is why it had taken nearly five years to build. Anyway, two years into the project they had dug the foundations and built a cellar there for their wine. They arrived one Saturday morning to get on with the next stage, when they discovered an old tramp sleeping in the cellar they had made. He was very friendly, offered to share with them his wine and his salami. “Hope you don’t mind if I stay here,” he said. “It’s out of the wind, and soon you will put a roof on and I shall be dry. I will help you, if you like. I have been a bit of a builder, bricklayer, carpenter.” It was difficult to say no. So they said yes. And the old tramp stayed on and helped them with the building work just as he had said.
Soon, the sitting room was built and the tramp moved in, living there with his sleeping bag and his bottles. But of course the time came, a couple of years further on, when the house was finally finished and they had to ask him to leave, explaining that they needed the house for themselves. They liked him a lot by this stage, so it was not easy to ask him to go. “I could go,” said the old tramp, “but I should be very sad to leave. Could you not build me a little shed down the bottom of the garden? I could live in there. I won’t be any trouble. And you’re sort of like family now.” Well, they couldn’t say no. They showed me a photo of this old tramp, lying out in the sun beside his shed at the bottom of the garden, looking as happy as you like. “Does he still drink?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” they said. “But we told him, only one bottle of beer a day. And he keeps to it – mostly.” Now I could go home and finish my story of Billy the Kid. I had an ending. Lucky man, again!
And again too, because that same evening in the country inn outside Aix provided me with the idea for a short story I was to write later, called Meeting Cézanne. It involves Picasso, who used to eat at this inn and draw pictures sometimes on the paper tablecloths, and Cézanne, who didn’t. Shan’t say another word about it. Read it. Digressing again.
BILLY THE KID
I could have sent a telegram home, but I didn’t. I thought I’d just walk in and surprise them. It was tea time. I never even knocked on the door. Emmy was there, they were all there. God, did I get a hugging – three of them all at once, and Mum going on and on about how I was just skin and bone. Emmy wept buckets, and even Ossie had to dry his eyes. I’d never seen him do that before. And he called me a young scallywag for not warning them. I gave Emmy back her gold cross and said it had worked, which it had. But she wouldn’t have it back, said I had to keep it. Back at Chelsea they treated me like a conquering hero. The war would be over soon enough now, six months, a year at the most, everyone knew it. They told me there’d always be a place for me back at the club when I’d finished with the army. I played a couple of practice games with some of the lads. I wasn’t as sharp as I had been – I wasn’t strong enough to be sharp – but I could still tease them with my dribbling.
I was soon out of puff though. I knew I’d have a lot of training, a lot of catching up to do if I was ever going to get back into the first team. But I’d do it. Nothing in the world was going to stop me from pulling on a Chelsea shirt again, not lousy Mr Hitler, nor his lousy war.
Home was difficult. They all knew I was going soon. So every day, every moment was precious, too precious for all of us. We couldn’t be normal. And Joe’s bed was still there across the room, and so was his box of cigarette cards on his shelf. I found myself talking to him even more now, sometimes aloud. I dreamt of him too, and I dreamt of Lucia and the shots echoing around the mountains.
I hate goodbyes, so I left a letter for each of them and crept out of the house before dawn. Once I was on the train to Dover, I was back in the army, back to left right, left right, saluting o
fficers and polishing boots. So they sent me off to war for the second time. How I wish they never had.
I thought the fighting would be mostly done with by now, and so it was. But there were still so many wounded to look after – our lads, and Germans, and refugees. We were treating as many refugees as soldiers. I drove ambulances, swabbed down floors, made beds, buried people. That was when I first started to drink with the lads. I never had before. When the work was over we’d get together and drown our sorrows. The drink was cheap, and I discovered I had a bit of a taste for it. No more than that. Not then. Not yet.
We’d heard about the camps, concentration camps where they’d been exterminating Jews and anyone they didn’t like; but I don’t think any of us really believd it. You had to see it to believe it. But when I saw it, I still couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.
As we drove in though the gates of Belsen in our convoy of ambulances, they came wandering towards us like ghosts, walking skeletons, some of them in striped pyjamas, some completely naked. They were staring at us as if we had come down from some other planet. The children would come up to us and touch us, just to make sure we were real, I think. You couldn’t call them children – more like little old people, skin and bone, nothing more, hardly living. They all moved slowly, shuffling. A strange silence hung over the place, and a horrible stench.
It was our job to do what we could for the sick, to get them eating again. As for the dying, we were usually too late.
We buried the dead in their thousands, in mass graves. You didn’t want to look, but you had to. Once you’ve seen such things you can never forget them. They give out no medals for burying the dead, but if they did I’d have a chestful. There was one little boy I found in his bunk. I thought he was asleep. He was curled up with his thumb in his mouth. He was dead. I wrote home, but I couldn’t tell them what I’d seen. I just couldn’t.
When I left Belsen a few days later in a convoy of ambulances I was full of hate and anger, full of horror, and full of grief too for the little boy with his thumb in his mouth. I drank every evening now, drank to forget.
Chelsea pensioners
Until the seventeenth century, the state made no specific provision for old and injured soldiers, who had to survive on handouts from the parish or from charities. Pensions for all ex-forces personnel were not introduced until after the First World War. Until then it would have been a common sight to see maimed and disfigured veterans begging on the streets.
Tradition credits Nell Gwyn, “pretty, witty Nell”, with using her influence over her lover, King Charles II, to establish the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Nell started life selling oranges at the Drury Lane Theatre, became an actress at fifteen and eventually rose to be the best known of the king’s many mistresses. In 1681, King Charles authorized the building of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, for the “succour and relief of veterans broken by age and war”. The buildings were designed by Sir Christopher Wren, one of the most famous English architects. Once the buildings were furnished, 476 retired non-commissioned officers and men went to live there in 1689. Each pensioner had a six-foot-square “berth” in wards known as “Long Wards”.
By the time the hospital was completed, there were more pensioners than places available in the hospital. Eligible ex-soldiers who could not be housed in the hospital were called out-pensioners, receiving their pension from the Royal Hospital but living outside it. In-pensioners surrendered their army pension and lived within the Royal Hospital. In return, veterans received board, lodging, clothing and medical care.
Until recently, if any of the pensioners from the last 300 years had been able to revisit the hospital, they would have found that little had changed. However, parts of it were heavily damaged during both World Wars and in 2009, considerable rebuilding and extension took place.
The hospital still maintains a “military-based culture which puts a premium on comradeship”. The in-pensioners are formed into four companies, each headed by a Captain of Invalids, responsible for the day-to-day organization and welfare of his charges.
In 2009, the first women in the hospital’s 317-year history were admitted as in-pensioners. Dorothy Hughes, who had been on an Anti-Aircraft Battery in the Second World War, was the first. She was followed by Winifred Phillips, of the Women’s Royal Army Corps. But curiously the records show that another woman, Mrs Christian Davies, was admitted in 1717, and was awarded a pension for her service and wounds received in the army. She died in 1739 and was buried with full military honours.
Pensioners regularly attend events leading up to Armistice Day, including the National Service of Remembrance at the Cenotaph. For the last hundred years the annual Chelsea Flower Show has been held in the grounds of the hospital. It is at these events that many of us see the pensioners’ unique public uniform for the first time, the distinctive scarlet coat and black tricorn hat designed by the first Duke of Marlborough in the eighteenth century. They have blue coats for everyday use.
Chelsea football team’s first club crest, used until 1952, featured a Chelsea pensioner, inspiring the club’s original nickname – “The Pensioners”. The picture of a pensioner appeared in match-day programmes. The nickname was dropped under the instructions of Ted Drake, who became Chelsea’s manager in the 1950s. Drake felt that the “Pensioners” tag was a bit embarrassing for a young, fit and successful football team!
Residents of the hospital can still be seen attending Chelsea’s home games at Stamford Bridge. When Chelsea won the Premier League title in 2005, Chelsea pensioners formed a guard of honour as the players came out for the trophy presentation. A few years later, in tribute to the trademark coats worn by the pensioners, Chelsea’s kit for the 2010–2011 season featured a red trim on the collars.
The link between club and hospital continues to this day, with the club allocating eight free seats for pensioners at each home game. The hospital holds a fortnightly lottery, and the lucky winners get to see the game live!
Private Peaceful
THE DREAM
Having published War Horse in 1982, I thought I was done with the First World War. I did not want to spend any more time in the trenches, among the suffering and the dying. I really did not want to revisit the world of that war in my stories again. But a few years later, whether I liked it or not, The Butterfly Lion simply led me back to those times, into that dreadful war.
After those two books, all my instincts were never to go there again. And indeed, for a while, my writing did take me elsewhere. But circumstance, in a way a direct legacy of having written both War Horse and The Butterfly Lion – as well as other stories I had written about the Second World War – brought me back to Belgium, back to Ypres, which I had often visited for research purposes. With Michael Foreman, I had been invited to a conference at the In Flanders Fields Museum in the old Cloth Hall in Ypres. Writers and illustrators came from all over the world to talk about writing about war for young people. I was invited, I am sure, because of War Horse and The Butterfly Lion; Michael Foreman because of his great classics, War Boy and War Game.
It was at this conference that I first met the a cappella singers Coope, Boyes and Simpson, whose songs from and about the First World War I knew and loved already. I did not know it then, but they were to become good and dear friends, later playing a huge part in the Private Peaceful story, and that we would end up performing together, interweaving my stories and their glorious music.
After the conference was over, Michael Foreman and I decided to spend some time visiting the In Flanders Field Museum. We were in for a shock. This museum pulled no punches. As we walked in, there was an in-depth introduction to the causes and preparations for the First World War in all the countries concerned. This told us at once that this was to be very different from other war museums. This was the story of the war as seen from all sides, not simply from a British or British Empire perspective. In that sense, it was unsettling, because both Michael and I were used to only the British take on the war. And
disturbing, of course, is how a museum about war should be, unsettling and enlightening.
As we moved deeper into the museum, the thunder of war came ever closer and the world about us grew darker. Then we were plunged into the fury and chaos of battle, into the horrors of trench warfare, into the pity, into the slaughter and the suffering, on all sides. Separated now in the darkness, Michael and I each heard the poetry of Wilfred Owen and John McCrae, heard the songs of the men marching off to war, the bands playing, and then read the letters home, from soldiers, nurses, understood how it had been for local families to be caught up in the fighting, to have their land and homes laid waste about them. All around us were the uniforms, the weapons, the photographs and paintings, the sound of shelling and machine gun fire, the songs, the poems. It was a vision of hell. We emerged, speechless, an hour or so later, near the exit. Tears would not let us speak. I stayed to look at the last few exhibits as Michael left, saying we’d meet in the square.
There was a rather insignificant-looking letter in a frame on the wall, I noticed. I have no idea why I stopped to read it – perhaps I was still composing myself before meeting up with Michael again, I don’t know. It was a small, typed letter, just a few lines. It read something like this:
Dear Mrs ——,
I regret to have to inform you that your son, Private ——, was shot at dawn for cowardice on the morning June —— 1916.
It was signed by a lieutenant.
Above the letter in the same frame, was the envelope. The envelope, I could see, had been ripped open, the tear jagged. It was that tear, as well as the cruel brevity of the letter, that I found so hard to take. I could visualize so clearly this mother standing on the front step of her terraced house, in Salford, I think it was, dreading a letter like this, knowing the news such letters might bring, then plucking up the courage to rip the envelope open. In those few words her life and the life of her family were shattered, the loss, the grieving, the shame overwhelming her.