A Month At The Front

DISCLAMER: contains topics such as war, and loss

A Month At The Front

When I came home, everything was the same. The house still carried that familiar scent, a mixture of floor wax and my mother’s cooking. My father was there of course, with his hand wrapped around a glass of red wine. He had been drinking more lately; he was a quiet and retired man who had found a way of disappearing into the furniture, fading into the background until he was just another shadow in the corner.

My mind drifted back to the kitchen. My mum was so proud of that extension and she had fought the winter cold when I was fourteen just to have it ready for Christmas. I could almost feel the phantom chill of that December as I stood there. We were children then. Jamie and I had stood on the edge of the wet concrete with our shoes caked in mud. The builders had laughed as they let us write our names in the setting grey slush. If you were to go back there now and peel back the pristine tiles my mother loved so much, you would find our names still there, locked in stone. Lucy and Jamie.

But the house was too busy today. It was buzzing with people, a gathering of family that felt like a swarm. I had spent hours answering the same questions of ‘are you alright?’ and ‘I’m so sorry’, it felt like I was a machine at this point, so when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went to my room. I went to MY room.

The azure walls were still there, though the marks from the blue-tac that used to hold up my posters looked like scars in the morning light. I had wanted the room to look like the beach: the cream carpet being the sand and the walls being the sea, but as the sun peeked through the curtains, the azure started to tint more green, like deep, cold water. I opened the top drawer of my dresser which was empty save for a faded travel brochure and an old diary. It was a gift from my tenth birthday, a year I mostly remembered for a hobby horse. I do admit that I had tucked the diary away and forgotten it, but I had written in it.

The memory of it pulled me back until the bedroom walls dissolved into the cramped and oak-stained rows of a schoolroom. I could see the younger version of myself, sitting at a desk that felt like a cage. Things were easier when I was young, even though I did not know it then. I could almost hear the ghosts of my classmates: the screech of chair legs and the petty wars fought over the boundary of a wooden desk. We thought those were the battles that mattered. We thought a snapped sandal strap was the ultimate catastrophe because we had no perspective. We did not know that the infamous farty jumper crime of year four would eventually pale into total insignificance. Nothing truly bad had ever really happened to me back then.

Except for the Fairy Liquid bottle.

I remember the water fight. The kids in the street were a riot of colour and screaming and I was desperate to be part of it. I cannot remember what I had for breakfast this morning, but I can see the exact curve of that white plastic tube and its red cap. My mum’s bottle was half full. I did not think; I just tipped the contents down the sink and watched the green soap swirl away to make room for the water I needed to fight back. I do not remember the fight itself, but I only remember the tears and the conifers. Daniel’s garden across the street was a fortress of itchy and dark pine that smelt of resin and secrets. I hid there while the dust stuck to my sweaty face until Jamie found me. He told me mum wanted me home because the sink was full of bubbles and she knew what I had done. I lied and said it was not me, but he just laughed at me and said to be back by 4 or mum would get real mad.

I had been grounded and confined to my room for the night. That was the injustice that forced me to open the diary and write Lucinda Millard. I wrote about the sentence I was serving and the unfairness of a ten-year-old girl being denied a water fight while her older brother laughed at her misery. Maybe that is why the soldier wrote his diary too. Perhaps it was the injustice of it all.

I was at my part time job as a librarian as Mr Rawlings limped towards me. He was an old fellow who worked there too as my manager, but he was sweet, just a bit odd. As he was blabbering about this git stealing his parking space and some apple carts, suddenly he said something that gave him my attention. He exclaimed excitedly that he had a big job for me, down in the office. With curiosity I strolled to the reception and told them that I was Lucy Millard. The receptionist nodded and handed me a large brown box and said to sort the books out.

Not the ‘big job’ I was hoping for, but I sorted through them anyway with no complaint. The Lord Of The Rings, we'd had new additions since the release of the films. Ophelia, by Lisa Klein. Dear John by Nicholas Sparks. Tender Wire by,.. ...I forget who, and at the bottom, a small unassuming book. It had been made to look like an old manuscript or sketch book. I read the title: ‘A month at the front’

I opened the front cover and as I turned the pages to start reading, the library seemed to dissolve into a landscape of jagged wire and suffocating mud. I wasn't just reading; I was there, standing in the rain-slicked trenches of 1917 as I heard sounds of gunshots and smelt the biting, chemical sting of cheap tobacco that caught in the back of the throat like a warning.

I watched Watts, that boy of eighteen and a half who had made it very clear that he volunteered to be here, and that he enjoyed playing with rifles. He was terrified of the rats but tried to joke about looking "dapper" in a uniform that was 2 sizes too big. Beside him was Brown, the merry one with the filthy language, who promised to keep the boy safe. They had survived the "farty jumpers" and the snapped sandals of their own childhoods, only to be dropped into a world where the air tasted of cordite.

I read about Captain Neville, a man who understood the physics of fear better than anyone. On the morning of the Somme, he knew that if his men walked toward the German lines, they would be walking toward their own graves. He knew the German machine gunners needed only a few moments after the bombardment stopped to set up their weapons. So, he stood on top of the trench and kicked a leather football out into the smoke of no-man’s-land. He told his boys to chase it. He turned a massacre into a match, knowing that if they ran after that ball, they would reach the wire before the Germans could even pull a trigger. They chased that ball through the mud like children in a park, because they could not bear to look at the guns, reaching the enemy lines through sheer, frantic momentum.

I realised then that I was just like Captain Neville. I was kicking a ball into no-man’s-land. I was focusing on the research, the psychology, and my "big job" at the library just so I wouldn’t have to look at the reality of the empty chair at the dinner table downstairs. I was giving myself something to chase, a distraction, a project, so I wouldn't have to face the fact that Jamie, like Watts and Brown, wasn't coming home.

I sometimes think I would have preferred a sister. An older sister. Someone to help me choose clothes or do my hair the way the older girls did theirs. But he was actually pretty cool. Years later, when Jamie joined the Parachute regiment, I remember going to see him pass out. He was in his number 1s. His boots were like mirrors. He was so proud of those boots. Mum cried, dad Dad not so much. He'd turned Jamie's room into a gym, and I think he was glad to see the back of him. He was proud though, we all were. On the 27th of March this year my brother was part of a small patrol that entered Sangi on the outskirts of the Helmand province when an IED hidden by the roadside exploded. Jamie was the lead man on the patrol that day and he died instantly.

Outside the sun was finally breaking over the horizon and bathing the room in an unforgiving golden light. The lark’s aubade reached a crescendo as a frantic serenade to the morning that Jamie would never see. They went for an adventure. Some for king and country! You could argue that the war was meaningful and that there was some sort of purpose to it all but it's difficult, so bloody difficult to see that amongst all of the lists. The lists of the wounded and the dead.

We would fight, but they were silly, he always looked out for me. That’s what siblings do. I was still hoping he would come to find me in those conifers, the moss green umbrella that was itchy, the rich pinewood smell, me being soaked which made sap from the trees stick to my poka-dotted shirt, but he won’t, I was just convincing myself he would. Letting go doesn’t mean that I’m forgetting him, it just means I need to move on to a different chapter. I can’t be stuck on platform 1 my entire life.

I closed the book and the lark stopped singing. I stood up and smoothed my dress before preparing to go back to the house that was still buzzing with a silence I finally had to face. I sometimes think I would have stayed in those itchy conifers forever, if I’d known that the bubbles in the sink were the only trouble I’d ever truly be able to wash away.