London, 1938. William is grieving over his former teacher and mentor, killed fighting for the Republicans in Spain. As Europe slides towards war, he abandons his dream of a life in academia to support his family by working in a factory manufacturing Spitfire parts. And then he bumps into Elizabeth, an old school friend. It isn’t long before the pair are falling in love – but Elizabeth is no longer the girl he remembers.
Caught in a web of counter-espionage, street-fighting, family tension and conflicting desires, William investigates suspicious behaviour at the factory, unleashing tragic consequences that catapult him into the dangerous world of Franco’s Spain, where he must confront what it means to be civilised.
London, 1938. William is grieving over his former teacher and mentor, killed fighting for the Republicans in Spain. As Europe slides towards war, he abandons his dream of a life in academia to support his family by working in a factory manufacturing Spitfire parts. And then he bumps into Elizabeth, an old school friend. It isn’t long before the pair are falling in love – but Elizabeth is no longer the girl he remembers.
Caught in a web of counter-espionage, street-fighting, family tension and conflicting desires, William investigates suspicious behaviour at the factory, unleashing tragic consequences that catapult him into the dangerous world of Franco’s Spain, where he must confront what it means to be civilised.
Cedric is dead and he must be honoured. This honouring upon his mind, William Hand crosses empty Enfield marketplace, passing posters flapping their shouts of Hitler, towards St Andrew’s Church, where mourners gather beneath its square tower and crenellated walls. A bell tolls.
He reaches into a deep inside pocket of his best overcoat, touches a small book there and surrenders to a stabbing of primeval anger, a desire for revenge. Buffeting winds beat at his back, propelling him forward across hard marketplace cobbles to the church. With the wind comes spitting, icy drizzle.
Among dripping cypresses he joins a knot of mourners. They pass through the south porch and the church interior closes around him, as it did when he was a pupil at the grammar school next door. No hymn from the organ, though. Is it a Debussy Arabesque instead? A lean lad wearing a sixth-former’s blazer hands him an order of service.
Cedric Paul Reece: 23rd January, 1904 – 18th January, 1938
The words are printed above a youthful snapshot of his former teacher in a white cricket shirt, collar turned up. In this picture, Cedric is younger than William is now.
Cedric should not be gone. He should be coaching cricket and bashing classics into the heads of schoolboys.
William spots Peter and Bertie, sidles into the aisle seat next to them. He thinks of all the schoolboy scrapes the three of them survived. And later scrapes of young adulthood. He never dreamed Cedric would outscrape them all on a Spanish battlefield, smashed to pieces by Franco’s brute artillerymen.
‘We’re with you,’ says Peter, whose expressive face and dark curls retain an echo of the quick, curious youth he was.
‘Good luck,’ says Bertie, placing a hand on William’s shoulder. Like Peter, Bertie is becoming more of a man, but he is a man with pink cheeks and a schoolboy’s sparkling blue eyes.
A willowy young vicar William doesn’t recognise speaks words meant to comfort. Above him is a mural of the crucifixion, painted in 1923 as a memorial to Great War dead. Different war, same tired and bloody outcome.
Everyone stands for ‘Abide With Me’. No more sweet Debussy. Cedric’s widow, Maria, severely beautiful in traditional mourning dress, rises to read a poem in Spanish. How she does it without succumbing to the anger that must be twisting inside her is a miracle. Then it’s William’s turn to quell his anger and honour Cedric. He is to read a poem by Catullus, in Latin, at Maria’s request. It’s not one of the saucy ones but a happy and sad verse he and Cedric loved. His knees are trembling as he walks up the aisle. But, when he begins to read from the little volume Cedric found for him in Barcelona’s last unshelled bookshop, his voice is firm. It’s easier to do this stuff in a foreign language, he discovers – grateful for another miracle in a world short of fucking miracles.
In Sunday best, Mr and Mrs Reece shelter in the south porch from blowing drizzle. They look unmoored, uncomprehending. Their son’s passage in life – from a factory worker’s cottage in Ponders End to Enfield Grammar School, on to a scholarship place at university in Newcastle and back to EGS to teach – must have seemed glorious to them, a destiny in itself. Who knows what they make of Cedric’s second destiny – Spain, the International Brigade, death at the Battle of Teruel.
‘Well done, son,’ says Cedric’s dad, looking him in the eye as they shake hands. ‘Couldn’t understand a word but well done.’
Mr Reece begins a smile, for he has said something funny and William knows him to be a man who has said funny things all his life. But then the poor fellow remembers his son is dead and his mouth twitches and he lowers his eyes.
Mute with grief, Cedric’s mum clasps William’s hands in her own, made rough by thirty years of service at the Royal Small Arms factory.
‘Reading that poem was the least I could do,’ William tells them. ‘He taught me so much.’
Cedric unlocked the classics for William, transformed them from dead tales into stories that sprang from the page and burrowed into his head forever. Now, Cedric is gone. No more tales from Herodotus. No more wicketkeeping wisdom. No more shandy and Spanish fags outside the Old Sergeant after cricket practice.
William walks to the edge of the churchyard, unruly anger rising in him and tears stinging his eyes. He turns to view St Andrew’s. Past easing drizzle, he sees the church’s buff stone tower and a partial view of the red bricks of Enfield Grammar School beyond. Then everything tips and slides as, through his tears, he recognises a face he has not seen for years among mourners filing out. It is Elizabeth Fay. Tiny, dark and slightly Gallic, she’s wearing an overcoat of deep plum, almost black. And a beret, black. Her eyes are cast downwards, the order of service held in both hands before her as she queues to offer condolences to Mr and Mrs Reece. She does not see William. She is at once a sixth-former from the girls’ school across the way and someone new, adult, knowing. Mind you, she was always knowing as a schoolgirl.
Peter and Bertie arrive either side of William, each placing an arm around his shoulders.
‘Come on, boys, let’s drink to Cedric,’ says Peter. ‘It was a good service in its way. But it was bloody awful, too. Poor old Cedric. Poor Maria. Poor his poor old mum and dad. What a dreadful fucking mess.’
‘A horrible, horrible mess,’ says Bertie. ‘It makes me so angry.’
‘We’re all angry,’ says William. ‘The Fascist savages who did for Cedric make me angry. And so does our useless government, who won’t stand up to Franco. And us, I’m angry with all of us. Why can’t we be better?’
The family has hired a good-sized room above the King’s Head for Cedric’s wake. Climbing the stairs, William realises he’s hungry. Inside the room, a sturdy young woman with kind, red lips and blonde, shingled hair is pouring cups of strong tea at a table in front of big sash windows through which winter light tumbles through rising cigarette smoke onto a faded Persian carpet.
William takes a cuppa and puts an extra sugar in it, like elevenses at the factory. Peter does the same. They both gulp the hot, sweet liquid.
‘Do we know what happened?’ William asks Peter. ‘They fudged it at the service.’
‘No. That pair of Brigade types in the corner might know. They look suitably fierce and tragic.’
‘And handsome, you irrepressible deviant. You’d better go and ask them. Wait till they’ve had a proper drink.’
William smiles, despite the sombre occasion. His friend’s boundless capacity for flirting with handsome fellows always makes him smile.
Half a head taller than most of the mourners, Bertie enters with three pint glasses clutched between long-fingered hands.
‘I was going to get beers,’ he says as he offers the pints for William and Peter to take. ‘Then I thought shandies. For the memory of Sir.’
‘Bertie, that’s very decent of you,’ says William.
‘I thought we could have a toast,’ Bertie says.
‘William, dear boy, you lead it,’ says Peter. ‘He just taught us cricket and shandies and fags. He was your classics master. He got you your scholarship.’
Cedric was so pleased when William won his place at Armstrong College in Newcastle upon Tyne to study classics. But that isn’t the point. What can he say? There must be more to this man’s death than it being a dreadful fucking mess.
‘Cedric Reece—’ he begins, then falters. But, like a brother legion in a Gaulish forest, Latin arrives just in time. ‘Vir honestus erat,’ he declares.
‘An honourable man. Well done, William,’ says Peter. ‘I knew you’d have the right words.’
They raise their pints of shandy.
‘And one, two, three! Tant Que Je Puis!’
‘As Much As I Can’, in Old French. For a school motto, it isn’t bad.
Their little toast was loud among the mourners. Several people look at the trio of young men. A middle-aged lady who might be Cedric’s aunt smiles.
William is tasting shandy, smelling grass and leather, and Cedric’s aromatic Spanish cigarettes. Peter and Bertie will be remembering drinks after cricket but William is recalling quiet Saturday lunchtimes in the year before university, when he and Cedric would meet at the Old Sarge and Cedric would coach him for his scholarship exam, before slipping off to Ponder’s End for one of his mum’s pies.
Cedric loved pie. Even school dinner pie. The sturdy young woman is serving portions of hot steak and kidney pie from a battered aluminium baking tray that looks like it has come straight from Enfield Grammar’s kitchens. Maybe it has. The pie smells wonderful – thick and meaty. William joins the pie queue.
‘Hello you.’
William turns, and it is Elizabeth. The plum overcoat is gone. She has on a black, fine corduroy pinafore dress and a black, silk blouse. Her hair is neatly bobbed under the beret. She’s somewhat smarter than her schooldays. The look is well-turned-out bohemian.
‘I heard your toast and I knew it’d be you lot.’
Her voice is the same. Low and penetrating. Her vital presence subsumes his grief and allows a remembered brew of admiration and lust to invade. Then he’s back in the room above the King’s Head, at poor old Cedric’s wake. Pull yourself together. Best foot forward.
‘We had to do the toast,’ he says. ‘He taught it to us. Happy days.’
Elizabeth’s eyes are pale grey and William remembers them as constantly on the move when she spoke. Now they are looking straight at him and filling with tears.
‘Happy days. I’m so sorry, William. I know he meant a lot to you. Us girls thought he was the bee’s knees.’
‘Yes, Cedric Reece was the bee’s knees, alright. He got me on to that scholarship.’
‘Your lovely dead languages and your stories that never grow old.’
‘They don’t. He didn’t just teach me, he sort of willed it into me.’
William’s eyes are hot and wet again. It feels embarrassing and appropriate all at once.
‘Oh, you poor old fellow. How can I cheer you up?’
‘Talk to me. You were always good at talking.’
‘I was, wasn’t I? I fear I still am.’
She smiles a smile William associates with that sixth-former who seemed to know herself – and who knew her peers far better than they knew themselves. These were, and are, rare qualities.
‘How’s your dad and marvellous George? He must be a big lad now.’
‘The old man’s cough-box is playing up so he had to leave the tube factory. I’m hoping his lungs will improve once we get this horrible winter done with, but money’s tight. I was going to do an MA but I’m back at the factory for now, putting cash in the coffers. George is fine but he eats like a horse and needs new shoes every bloody term. Dad and I are determined to keep him at Grammar.’
‘You’re a good son and brother, William. Pa sends his love. And Ma. Pa says he hasn’t seen your dad for a while. Perhaps we should invite you all round for supper, if your dad wouldn’t think it was too much like charity.’
‘I’ll persuade him. Dad has always liked Alton.’
‘Good. I’ll speak to Pa. Now, I’ve got to talk, haven’t I? Well, I’ve got a job. It’s at the Air Ministry, sort of. I’m not really supposed to talk about it, so that’s a bit tricky given my present mission, but I get an hour for lunch – a proper whole hour – so if it’s not raining and not too cold, I go to the park and sit on a bench and read while I eat my sandwiches. Ma makes my sandwiches. She is meant to be a modern woman and above all that sort of thing, but she says she wants to spoil me for a little while longer so I let her do it. Of course, Ma being Ma, her sandwiches are a bit plain and all done in a rush. Meat paste at the beginning of the week and fish paste at the end. The slices of bread are never the same thickness. There’s an apple and a square of chocolate from the French shop Grandmama goes to, or just English chocolate if there’s none of the French stuff. Just one square. I won’t be getting fat on Ma’s packed lunches. I’m sick of all the English literature classics after three years of them at Oxford so I read modern stuff, you’ll be glad to hear. I expect I’ll go to Hell for it but there you are. I sit on a bench, reading a novel with hardly any definite articles in it and I look up from time to time and see people in overcoats and hats wandering around and I wonder about them for a moment, and then I go back to my definite article-less novel and then I look up again and it carries on like that until five mins to go, and then I rush back and begin again on things I’m not supposed to talk about.’
William is a bit lost for a reply. He recalls that it was often this way with Elizabeth. He dares instead to look at her calm, intelligent face. He takes strength from this sight.
Peter and Bertie drift over before he’s obliged to say anything.
‘Hello, you lovely boys,’ says Elizabeth. ‘You were the best boys, the nicest boys.’
‘And you were the nicest girl,’ says Peter. ‘You were to me, anyway, when I was in my flowery phase.’
‘And a very brave and interesting phase it was, too. I am sure you are all the better for having had it.’
‘Hello, Elizabeth,’ says Bertie.
‘Bertie, I swear you’ve grown. Which is not what I should say to a fine fellow like yourself. But you have. And your suit is terribly smart.’ She steps back and regards them. ‘In fact, you’re all terribly smart.’
‘Bertie cuts for fine gentlemen these days,’ says Peter, striking a Beau Brummell pose. ‘Mr EJC Bird of Savile Row rescued Bert from Burtons and now he can’t do without him.’
‘I get a discount for chums,’ says Bertie. ‘That’s why these two look half-presentable.’
‘Mr Bird’s top-of-the-range stuff is very dear,’ says Peter. ‘But he lets Bertie give discounts to friends who are young and fabulous. It’s quite an experience.’
‘I saved for a year to buy this suit,’ says William. ‘I was on a pittance from the university for cataloguing Mesopotamian crocks but splashing out was worth it. Just bloody rotten luck that the first time I wear it has to be at Cedric’s memorial service.’
‘Oh, poor old Cedric,’ says Peter. ‘I forgot why we were here for a second.’
They are all silent.
‘Let’s have some of that pie,’ says Bertie.
The pie is as delicious as it smells. William, Bertie and Peter all have an extra helping. Then there are cakes and more cups of tea. After that, Peter goes downstairs to get a round in. When he returns with their pints, Steven Mallard is with him. He is a large, solid fellow who started a year above them at school but stayed on an extra year in the sixth form.
‘Steven, you came,’ says Bertie.
‘I slipped in at the back. Had to see a fellow this morning so I cut it a bit fine. But Cedric was my teacher, too, so I thought I’d better show up – whatever I thought about his beliefs.’
He sips from the large whisky he has brought up with him.
‘Good on you for coming,’ says Bertie. ‘You missed our shandy toast. We did TQJP for Cedric.’
‘Good show,’ says Steven. ‘Old Cedric would’ve liked that.’ He turns to William. ‘Good to see you, William. You got the day off alright?’
Steven’s father, Henry Mallard, owns Lea Albion Metal Tubing Company Limited, where William works and where William’s dad worked, before it got too much for his chest. Steven is meant to be learning the business.
‘I did,’ says William. ‘Well done for coming.’
‘I was chatting to a couple of Reds downstairs,’ says Steven, swirling his whisky. ‘They were in his unit. Said it was pretty rough wherever it was they were.’
‘Teruel,’ says William. ‘They were at the Battle of Teruel.’
‘Yes, that’s the place. Funny name. Well, it was rough there, they said. Heavy shelling for days. Some of the poor bastards had to be scooped into groundsheets and buried on the spot. Or left.’
‘Christ, there’s no need to rub it in,’ says William, anger clutching at him afresh.
‘I’m not rubbing it in,’ Steven replies. ‘I’m just telling you what the Red chaps said. I didn’t blow him up, you know.’
‘But you support the bastards who did.’
Steven puffs out his chest.
‘Someone in Europe has got to stand up to communism.’
‘And our government effectively is,’ William replies, frustration making his throat feel tight. ‘Chamberlain’s non-intervention wheeze means we’re not giving the Republicans so much as a pop gun. That doesn’t mean we have to go the whole hog and start blowing trumpets for Fascists and Nazis.’
Elizabeth has been talking to the lady who looks like Cedric’s auntie. Now she rejoins the group.
‘Steven,’ she says. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’
Steven’s square, fleshy face is registering that Elizabeth’s greeting contains an edge. But he hasn’t worked out what that edge is yet.
‘Hello, Elizabeth,’ Steven says. ‘You look well.’
‘It’s easy to look well at a funeral, Steven, simply because one is alive.’
Light from those big sash windows bathes her face, making it lovely but displaying also her firm jaw and knowing grey eyes.
‘Fighting communism may make you feel good,’ she continues. ‘But everything we do has consequences. And that’s when things start to go wrong.’
William Hand and his school friends re-connect to grieve the loss of their teacher, who was killed fighting for the Republicans in Spain. Life is turning out to be far different than what they had imagined. At the funeral, William also meets up with Elizabeth, a girl that he knew when he was a child and soon finds himself falling in love with her. She comes across as strong, talented and beautiful.
Although William is university educated, he needs money to support his Dad and younger brother, so he has taken a job at a factory manufacturing spitfire parts. Working at the factory is a hard job, but William opts to take the night shift because it pays more money. He soon realizes that the factory floor boss isn't just an unpleasant man; he might be engaging in espionage and sabotage.
WWI may be over, but geopolitical unrest is building in the late 1930s with Hitler on the rise and Oswald Mosley at home stirring up fascist support. William is also frustrated as his family and some friends are falling for some of the propaganda. Soon, he is caught up in counter-espionage work and propelled off to fascist Spain.
John Ludlam has crafted an engaging novel centred around family, love and loss, changing geopolitical landscapes and the hardships of war. It is well researched and certainly thought-provoking on how the world was propelled into WWII.
The characters are well written and gradually rounded out as the story builds. However, I did sometimes find myself a little lost in the plot and action and had to reread some sections to catch the right threads. Regardless, it is a solid historical novel that brings to life what it was like in England and Europe during this tumultuous period and how quickly life could change due to political views and actions.
Well worth your time!