As the Crow Flies Read online

  Charlie put on his new suit, the one Mrs. Smelley had commented on, his best shirt, his father’s tie, a flat cap and his only pair of leather shoes. I’m meant to be fighting the Germans, not going to a wedding, he said out loud as he looked at himself in the cracked mirror above the washbasin. He had already written a note to Becky—with a little help from Father O’Malley—instructing her to sell the shop along with the two barrows if she possibly could and to hold on to his share of the money until he came back to Whitechapel. No one talked about Christmas any longer.

  “And if you don’t return?” Father O’Malley had asked, head slightly bowed. “What’s to happen to your possessions then?”

  “Divide anything that’s left over equally between my three sisters,” Charlie said.

  Father O’Malley wrote out his former pupil’s instructions and for the second time in as many days Charlie signed his name to an official document.

  After Charlie had finished dressing, he found Sal and Kitty waiting for him by the front door, but he refused to allow them to accompany him to the station, despite their tearful protest. Both his sisters kissed him—another first—and Kitty had to have her hand prised out of his before Charlie was able to pick up the brown paper parcel that contained all his worldly goods.

  Alone, he walked to the market and entered the baker’s shop for the last time. The two assistants swore that nothing would have changed by the time he returned. He left the shop only to find another barrow boy, who looked about a year younger than himself, was already selling chestnuts from his pitch. He walked slowly through the market in the direction of King’s Cross, never once looking back.

  He arrived at the Great Northern Station half an hour earlier than he had been instructed and immediately reported to the sergeant who had signed him up on the previous day. “Right, Trumper, get yourself a cup of char, then ’ang about on platform three.” Charlie couldn’t remember when he had last been given an order, let alone obeyed one. Certainly not since his grandfather’s death.

  Platform three was already crowded with men in uniforms and civilian clothes, some chatting noisily, others standing silent and alone, each displaying his own particular sense of insecurity.

  At eleven, three hours after they had been ordered to report, they were finally given instructions to board a train. Charlie grabbed a seat in the corner of an unlit carriage and stared out of the grimy window at a passing English countryside he had never seen before. A mouth organ was being played in the corridor, all the popular melodies of the day slightly out of tune. As they traveled through city stations, some he hadn’t even heard of—Peterborough, Grantham, Newark, York—crowds waved and cheered their heroes. In Durham the engine came to a halt to take on more coal and water. The recruiting sergeant told them all to disembark, stretch their legs and grab another cup of char, and added that if they were lucky they might even get something to eat.

  Charlie walked along the platform munching a sticky bun to the sound of a military band playing “Land of Hope and Glory.” The war was everywhere. Once they were back on the train there was yet more waving of handkerchiefs from pin-hatted ladies who would remain spinsters for the rest of their lives.

  The train chugged on northwards, farther and farther away from the enemy, until it finally came to a halt at Waverly Station in Edinburgh. As they stepped from the carriage, a captain, three NCOs and a thousand women were waiting on the platform to welcome them.

  Charlie heard the words, “Carry on, Sergeant Major,” and a moment later a man who must have been six feet six inches in height, and whose beer-barrel chest was covered in medal ribbons took a pace forward.

  “Let’s ’ave you in line then,” the giant shouted in an unintelligible accent. He quickly—but, Charlie was to learn later, by his own standards slowly—organized the men into ranks of three before reporting back to someone who Charlie assumed must have been an officer. He saluted the man. “All present and correct, sir,” he said, and the smartest-dressed man Charlie had ever seen in his life returned the salute. He appeared slight standing next to the sergeant major, although he must have been a shade over six feet himself. His uniform was immaculate but paraded no medals, and the creases on his trousers were so sharp that Charlie wondered if they had ever been worn before. The young officer held a short leather stick in a gloved hand and occasionally thumped the side of his leg with it, as if he thought he were on horseback. Charlie’s eyes settled on the officer’s Sam Browne belt and brown leather shoes. They shone so brightly they reminded him of Rebecca Salmon.

  “My name is Captain Trentham,” the man informed the expectant band of untrained warriors in an accent that Charlie suspected would have sounded more in place in Mayfair than at a railway station in Scotland. “I’m the battalion adjutant,” he went on to explain as he swayed from foot to foot, “and will be responsible for this intake for the period that you are billeted in Edinburgh. First we will march to the barracks, where you will be issued supplies so that you can get yourselves bedded down. Supper will be served at eighteen hundred hours and lights out will be at twenty-one hundred hours. Tomorrow morning reveille will be sounded at zero five hundred, when you will rise and breakfast before you begin your basic training at zero six hundred. This routine will last for the next twelve weeks. And I can promise you that it will be twelve weeks of absolute hell,” he added, sounding as if the idea didn’t altogether displease him. “During this period Sergeant Major Philpott will be the senior warrant officer in charge of the unit. The sergeant major fought on the Somme, where he was awarded the Military Medal, so he knows exactly what you can expect when we eventually end up in France and have to face the enemy. Listen to his every word carefully, because it might be the one thing that saves your life. Carry on, Sergeant Major.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Sergeant Major Philpott in a clipped bark.

  The motley band stared in awe at the figure who would be in charge of their lives for the next three months. He was, after all, a man who had seen the enemy and come home to tell the tale.

  “Right, let’s be having you then,” he said, and proceeded to lead his recruits—carrying everything from battered suitcases to brown paper parcels—through the streets of Edinburgh at the double, only to be sure that the locals didn’t realize just how undisciplined this rabble really was. Despite their amateur appearance, passersby still stopped to cheer and clap. Out of the corner of one eye Charlie couldn’t help noticing that one of them was resting his only hand against his only leg. Some twenty minutes later, after a climb up the biggest hill Charlie had ever seen, one that literally took his breath away, they entered the barracks of Edinburgh Castle.

  That evening Charlie hardly opened his mouth as he listened to the different accents of the men babbling around him. After a supper of pea soup—“One pea each,” the duty corporal quipped—and bully beef, he was quartered—and learning new words by the minute—in a large gymnasium that temporarily housed four hundred beds, each a mere two feet in width and set only a foot apart. On a thin horsehair mattress rested one sheet, one pillow and one blanket. King’s Regulations.

  It was the first time Charlie had thought that 112 Whitechapel Road might be considered luxurious. Exhausted, he collapsed onto the unmade bed, fell asleep, but still woke the next morning at four-thirty. This time, however, there was no market to go to, and certainly no choice as to whether he should select a Cox’s or a Granny Smith for breakfast.

  At five a lone bugle woke his companions from their drowsy slumber. Charlie was already up, washed and dressed when a man with two stripes on his sleeve marched in. He slammed the door behind him and shouted, “Up, up, up,” as he kicked the end of any bed that still had a body supine on it. The raw recruits leaped up and formed a queue to wash in basins half full of freezing water, changed only after every third man. Some then went off to the latrines behind the back of the hall, which Charlie thought smelled worse than the middle of Whitechapel Road on a steaming summer’s day.

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