The Telegram
The telegram was in the pocket of her coat, hidden beneath the frayed cuff of one of her gardening gloves. It was cold in the tiny flint-faced church, but Connie couldn’t plait the stalks and winter flowers into place on the altar with her fingers in leather, so the gloves remained in her pocket with the telegram. still unopened, still unread.
after four years of war, Connie had seen too many such notifications to want to read another: “It is my painful duty to inform you that on this day a report has been received from the War office notifying the death of…” offering pressed handkerchiefs and a nip of whisky, unwilling witness to the worst of news delivered to the wives of blacksmiths and labourers and dairymen, the sisters of clerks and men of business. No family in the village spared. In Fishbourne, as in every parish of sussex, the names of boys and men fallen at Richebourg or the somme or amiens were already being carved on stone memorials springing up now the armistice had been signed.
Now Harry’s name too?
Connie blew on her hands to warm them before attempting to twist another sprig of hawthorn for the altar. In her trug, her secateurs and wild roses too. there was an austere beauty in the fading light of the December afternoon, which suited her mood. Glints of weak sun shimmered through the stained-glass windows, lighting the white altar cloth and the wooden choir stalls.
Connie’s hand slipped, again, to her pocket. the telegram had been burning a hole there since the gap-toothed post-office girl had knocked on the door of blackthorn House at two o’clock that afternoon. but she would not read it, not yet. she knew it was foolish – the words would not alter – but she wanted a few precious minutes more of not knowing.
For though she had spent months preparing for the worst, striking bargains with a god she no longer believed in, it would be too cruel if her husband had survived the years of the war, only to fall in the first days of the peace. skin, blood and bone.
Kitchener’s army, they’d called them in those early days. Connie had stood watching the men march out from the barracks and down the broyle Road to the railway station. singing, some of them, their untrained voices filling the streets of Chichester. Flags waving, the pride of the 8th battalion of the Royal sussex Regiment, cigarettes in their kitbags and badges polished. Home by Christmas, the newspapers said, but that first December had come and gone, then the next and the next and the next. all those lost lives, millions and millions of men, fallen in a war no one wanted. Connie pictured the calendar that hung beside the kitchen door. saw her own hand tearing off the pages to
mark the turning of the years. then, they said it was over. the armistice signed in a railway carriage in France on the eleventh day of November. but Harry had not come home and Connie stood here now at the tail end of another year, not knowing if she was a widow or a wife.
Not yet come home.
Connie frowned, not wanting to give in to self-pity. Plenty of men had come home, hadn’t they? the village was no longer so empty, although even those who bore no outward sign of injury carried something dark inside. she saw it in their blank eyes in the wards of the military hospital at Graylingwell. Row after row of silent soldiers lying in metal-framed beds, struck dumb by what they had witnessed. Connie understood. she was a survivor too. she had seen horrors, the bloodied bodies of murdered men no more than half a mile distant from this peaceful church, and had never talked of it. Not even to Harry. she understood why the soldiers kept their own counsel.
Connie adjusted the straw in the Nativity scene. the familiar wooden crib, the same painted Mary and Joseph and shepherds, the same baby Jesus ready to be placed into the manger on Christmas Eve. all looked the same as it ever did. It was just that the world was different.
out on the marshes, she could hear the cry of the curlews and the gulls, strange and haunting sounds of dusk. as she had walked across from her father’s house on the far side of Fishbourne Creek this afternoon, the telegram in her pocket, the tide had been coming in. the resilient evergreen yews in the churchyard a splash of colour in the barren winter landscape. Harry, a gifted amateur artist, would know precisely which hue of green to use: forest or Russian or sage. army green. a half smile came to her lips, then just as quickly, it faded. Connie would ask him when he came home. His tubes of paints and white spirit and canvases lay untouched, dusted, in his studio, as did the tools of her trade in her workshop. before the War, Connie had been a taxidermist, fulfilling the commissions her ailing father could no longer manage. but now, what had felt beautiful, a craft of skill and delicacy, a way of giving a new kind of life to the birds of the fields and the marshes, quickly became a reminder of what was happening on the battlefields of belgium and France. skin and blood and bone.
How things had changed. the jobs denied to women before had, by necessity, been taken up by those left behind. she now worked for the st Pancras Corporation in Chichester delivering food to Dear’s almshouses, and taught English >>
“The war was over. But now, at the tail end of another year, Connie still didn’t know if she was a widow or a wife”