IN THE FIELD

IN THE FIELD. ( by Sydney Peck )

For Harry and Mabel, as for most people in Europe just before the outbreak of war in 1914, the summer was a period of halcyon days.

Thud! Splodge! Thud! Splodge! Harry watched with dismay as the tent peg penetrated rapidly into the earth under the blows of his small hammer. He missed the peg once and his hammer whacked the mud with a wallop and the splat of brown-black ooze showered his shirt and trousers.

“Oh bloody hell, look at this!”

Mabel giggled infectiously and enjoyed the comic sight, “Harold Sutcliffe, your language is appalling!”

Harry laughed and grunted “Sorry Mabel, but oh my God this is a mess.....I’m not happy about this ground - the tent’s going to be blown away in the wind but it’s getting late so we will have to stay, at least for tonight.” His eye flickered to the pale sun giving up the ghost behind the clouds hanging over the wooded hills to the west.

Their two day epic ride had been very French, but not very interesting. They’d cycled past French horseback riders, and lots of other French people on French bicycles. French deer had wandered across their road in the French forest. That afternoon it had become rather more alien and foreign as it ought to have been. White chalk churches. Villages with Flemish style buildings. A few miles north of Arras in an ocean of rolling hedges and ditches, they’d dismounted and dropped their rucksacks and tent in a field just outside of the tiny village of Souchez. They’d had some coffee in the only tabac in the place, and then pedalled hard up the sloping road of the escarpment which rose 200 feet above the plain - to see the view eastward. The view from the ridge had been disappointing, spoiled by drizzle, but Mabel was enchanted. The chalk churches losing themselves in the murky air and the gently rolling bocage fading into distant flat fields, looking more like rows of skeletons as the distance increased.

“Oh Harry, I do like to watch spooky scenes and get a bit scared, as long as I’m with you. I’d love to camp right here,” she’d confided in childlike delight, grabbing his shirt arm and nuzzling into his chest.

Pulling slightly away after a few moments, and urging her onto her bike again, Harry’s tone became that of the father-protector, “Don’t be silly, Mabel, we have to get our campsite set up before dark and this ridge is too exposed for the tent. Look at the storm clouds over there, and the sun will be going down soon.” Free-wheeling down the road, they had found their dumped rucksacks and tent.

The soft black earth formed a slow-motion ripple as the roped peg pulled out easily in the rising wind. The empty peg hole filled with dark murky water. This was exactly the sort of English weather they had come here to avoid. The forecast had said they could expect warm, sunny days and problem-free cycling across Picardy, but forecasts could be wrong. The weather was indeed warm - even a bit close - and they’d only met a little rain so far. Of course the French newspaper forecast hadn’t mentioned the two weeks of heavy rain in early June which had already left the ground so soft.

Harry pulled himself up to his full six feet and stretched to the sky after his peg-wrestling session. In spite of the mud he was smartly turned out in chequered shirt and pressed beige pants, in contrast to Mabel’s loose sweater and long tartan skirt flapping about in the breeze. He liked her relaxed style. She looked so different from their wedding day in London a week ago, with her long white dress pressed meticulously by her mum the night before, and immaculate head veil. Her mum had dressed in floppy white hat and billowy dress, and dad had worn his best Christmas suit - pressed for the occasion. But the weather hadn’t cooperated. Harry laughed to himself as he wiped some of the mud from his pants.

Their big day on the 14th of June 1914 had been a day of unexpected thunderstorms. The winds had picked up from the north, dropping the temperature over the next few days, with torrential downpours all across London as well as northern France. They all had to dash through the showers from the church to the reception almost next door, looking like half-drowned rats. Harry’s people were not so badly off because they all had a tendency to wear rather tighter, business-like clothes which shed the rain better. The priest made a little joke that if people married on a rainy day it predicted they would have long lives and many children...all the guests smirked and laughed knowingly.

Before the wedding Mabel had told Harry, “Since we don’t have much money, we should take the train to Brighton for two weeks and stay with Auntie Joan. I went there loads of times as a child. Auntie Joan’s husband is a seaside entertainer, a singer, dancer, juggler type. We’d have lots of free entertainment.” It was all agreed. But two days after the wedding they had seen the weather forecast in the Evening News. Heavy rain and thunder storms all along the south coast, and she was terrified of lightning and thunder. So they’d discussed Scotland’s Trossachs and the Lake District, and other places needing many hours of train and much more money. Half-jokingly, Harry had suggested France, just across the Channel. Only a couple of hours away. On bikes, camping. Why not? It was ideal. Rather than spend two weeks watching the drizzle run down the windows of a Brighton terrace house overlooking the grey Channel, France it was.

Mabel’s infectious giggling gradually subsided as she wiped the last of the mud off his neatly ironed shirt, and she too mulled over their wedding celebrations, “Wasn’t it funny at the station when your dad said we’d get lost in France because we couldn’t speak a word of the language? And here we are - and half of them don’t even speak proper French but some sort of Dutch.”

“More like Double-Dutch,” Harry nodded and half-smiled with a shrug - every time they lost the way through these forest parklands they asked for directions with their school French, and people replied either in some strange guttural Flemish dialect, or in local Picard dialect, whose system of numbers completely foxed them and they fell about laughing in confusion with the locals.

Turning his thoughts over slowly, he added, “And your own mum, Mabel, was so funny when she stood up and announced that she hoped on our honeymoon to Brighton we wouldn’t miss ‘the rain’ instead of the train.” He smiled in genuine affection at her and her mother, and their easy-going, humour-loving ways.

Mabel chattered on as he continued to lay into the pegs with the hammer. “I thought your older brother Jimmy looked so tall and smart in his new uniform....You know Harry, I do so much like your family. As if I really belonged - and your sisters are just like real sisters to me. Oh, I wish I’d had brothers and sisters growing up. Your family gives me a lovely warm feeling inside.”

“Yes, my dad felt it was a great choice for Jim. Of course he would - as he’d been in the Indian army for several years when he was young. Mum thought it was a poor choice of career - probably thought it would leave Jim’s future wife alone, just like she had been. But Jimmy was keen to get in early and maybe earn promotion before everybody else did the same. So if there ever was to be a war - which you sometimes hear people talk about - he’d be well placed for promotion. You know, Bella, when we get home I think I might also join up - secure steady job same as Jimmy...and you know, Bel, it could be a career for life. It’s been harder and harder to find a job in the last few years, especially for an apprentice mechanic like me. That’s why I always felt we could make do with a registry office wedding and save money. Less emphasis on speeches and dressing formally - I don’t like that.”

“Oh, the speeches were worth the effort...and there’s never going to be any war........everyone knows that,” Mrs. Mabel Sutcliffe opined.

They were in relaxed picnic mode now, between the showers which had interrupted their trip that day. They were at last enjoying a longer stop in this field on a gently rising hill with a lovely view for miles across the vegetable fields. The English summer had again been rotten and unpredictable, and you couldn’t plan anything without it being washed out. So it was France for them, and better weather.

But it had been nip-and-tuck, just in time. “We were lucky to get the bikes on that train from Charing Cross. He wasn’t really supposed to allow excess baggage but the conductor was so nice and sympathetic because we were newly weds ...well, I think he liked you very much actually........” She reddened.

“And then in Dover we only just managed to catch the last ferry to Boulogne after we got stuck in traffic, because you found that short cut path to the dockside. You’re so clever, Harry.”

Harry dropped his hammer, sat down, and sprawled his long legs over the saddles of their hired touring bicycles. He found his cigarettes and lit one, thinking back over their travels. They’d made a long trip that day from Therouanne, getting lost at pretty little Houdain in maze of small winding lanes, and he’d bought two small fish for their supper and tried his French out. Bella laughed so heartily when he mistook poisson for poison and the shopkeeper also joined in. On the previous day from Boulogne through the forests and fields getting to Therouanne, he started to discover that his new wife was an amazing woman. In the café of a tennis club they had run out of French francs to pay, so she actually started to juggle with four tennis balls to entertain the customers, and the café owner accepted it as payment. She was delighted - and so was everyone else. For the next half hour she pedalled along through the woods, laughing and happily repeating at the top of her voice ‘jongleuse’ in the owner’s Picard accent.

“I’m absolutely tired out Bella, aren’t you?” Harry adjusted his calf muscle over the saddle.

“Oh yes, my legs are dropping off - I don’t want to move any more - just stay here forever,” she gazed admiringly into his eyes.

He offered to rub her tired muscles and did so for ten minutes while she closed her eyes.

“What about a spot of supper, Mabel?”

He gathered some dry sticks and small branches under a thick hedge for a fire. And she picked a wet bunch of blue cornflower, some yellow coltsfoot and a tall red poppy - and placed it in his shirt pocket. The heavy rain had brought all the wildflowers up tall and skinny but now it looked like the breeze was threatening to cut them down.

“It’s very pretty, it goes with your shirt,” she smiled.

“I never thought my scouting Saturdays would turn out to be so useful,” he chuckled as the fire crackled into life.

Harry produced the two small herrings from his rucksack. Soon they were sizzling in the hot butter over the campfire.

“......I can see a...yes, looks like a field of carrots over there - - see them sticking their little heads out in long rows? Hahaha” She tittered too on seeing them ........”Just a mo Bella...we’ll be eating like English rabbits in a few minutes, haha,” he chortled.

And he loped across the fence and into the fields. They turned out to be carrots and onions, so their supper was fried fish, together with two veg boiled in their tin camping pan. They polished off the last of the bottle of white wine in Mabel’s rucksack, and then turned in and fastened the tent against the coming storm.

“I hope the rain doesn’t mean lightning - I’m terrified of it,” she settled closer to him,. . . . “But I like ghost stories, if you can tell me one, can you?”

“OK listen and I will give it a try.” He closed his eyes and drew up a sketch in his mind... “Imagine if ghosts were coming towards us out of this mist....all around us ....and maybe if we too were ghosts of long-buried people coming out of the mud and through this fog. Could be Celts or Roman soldiers, you know?” he said, cuddling her close.

“Ugh it would be so messy with this mud,” her woman’s cleanliness instinct took over the tale, “and instead of being white like proper ghosts they d be brown and black ...ugh they’re horrible.”

He ploughed on with his story, brushing aside Mabel’s mud problems. Harry dwelt on the battles and the armies and their history. Agincourt, Crecy, the Celts and Romans, the Gauls. “And we could be lost here in this very field, all looking the same, covered in mud and dirt, and no one would ever find our graves, and we would wander the underworld as they used to say in those old poetry books at school. And never see the other side of the River Styx.” Mabel shivered, partly with the story and partly with the going down of the sun.

“Oh well, it’s only a story,” she stuck her head out and swiveling her eyes somewhat nervously around the field, “something to laugh about when we get back to England.”

The story made her cuddle closer. Her fear made them want to make love, joking about “having the perfume of fish”, falling asleep in each other’s arms, listening to the steady thrumming of raindrops on their canvas home. She relaxed in his protecting arms. Making love with Harry was so different from what mum had warned Mabel about, somewhat distastefully, as “her duty” which was necessary but messy and rather tiring. Mabel felt that it was something which she would voluntarily be delighted to take part in for the rest of her lifetime, rather than something to be compelled. Their breathing became synchronized and the slow regular drips from the flapping leaky canvas into their tin camping pan sent them like a drummer down the road to sleep.

After the windy night, the morning broke calm but chilly, with the sun trying to break through fog and looking like moonlight.

“Morning fog off the Channel just like England, it’ll be gone soon enough,” he murmured. They didn’t want to get up....chatting and nuzzling each other.

“Well, what about some breakfast - like English mice?” Mabel laughed. They ate their two remaining slices of cheese and the remainder of the bread, making some tea on the relit fire. It was damp and near dead with the rain, but Harry had built it extra high last night before bed and it was still capable of being blown back into life. They had no milk for their tea...they pulled faces as they drank it.

Harry was idly planning his next shopping adventure, “What’s French for ‘cheese’ again, Bella?”

She threw the last drops of the bitter black tea into the fire and said, “Sorry, love, I can’t remember.”

After their brief breakfast it was still wet outside so they rolled back into the sleeping bag and made love again. It didn’t tire them nor induce sleep, but rather energized them and they were ready to travel again. Mum had been quite wrong about the effect of making love. In this delightful world of their own, quite changed from the world they had left behind in England before they were married, making love and everything, even the bitter tea, was perfect. For them the world would never be the same again - for now they had each other, forever.

By eleven it still hadn’t cleared up but they rolled out of the tent, “No need to hurry darling, we’ve only got twenty miles to go today and we’ve all the time in the world.”

They happily packed all the gear, checked their tyres, dried the wet saddles, and in two minutes they disappeared on their bikes into the mist.

Comments