Читать книгу The Forgotten Soldier: He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy - Charlie Connelly, Charlie Connelly - Страница 12

I left what had been Gadsden Mews, re-emerged from the shadow of Trellick Tower into the glorious spring sunshine, made for central London, passed through Hyde Park and Victoria, walked through Westminster, over the river and onto the Thames Path. As I reached Bermondsey, the sky bruised and darkened, a chill wind blew up and the heavens opened. There wasn’t another soul on the Thames Path, and I walked for two and a half hours through Bermondsey, Rotherhithe and Deptford with the relentless pock, pock of raindrops on my waterproof and millions of pinpricks bursting on the grey-brown surface of the river. I was glad that I could stay at home that first night.

The next day my route through my native South-East London into Kent was arrow-straight and I was able to walk all the way out past the M25 without need for deviation until I reached Dartford, one of the first towns in the country to take in significant numbers of refugees fleeing the fighting on the Western Front. Within weeks of war being declared, bewildered Belgians began arriving in Dartford to be at first installed in the less-than-salubrious surroundings of the local workhouse before most were settled with obliging local families. Many found jobs in the town, including at the local Vickers munitions factory, where they made shells that could feasibly have ended up landing in their own back yard.

Such was the Belgian presence in Dartford that at one point a Belgian café opened, and the town began to take on a distinctly cosmopolitan air. The German prisoners of war in local hospitals before they were transferred to camps, as well as the arrival of Australian and American wounded, meant that the walls of the wards echoed with a range of accents and languages and, given the pain most of these men were in, rarely can so many swear words in so many languages and dialects have been heard in one place.

Further east I arrived one sunny spring afternoon in Gravesend, which was the scene of one of the war’s more curious incidents. Captain Robert Campbell of the 1st Battalion, East Surrey Regiment, had been a reservist before the war and was among the first to cross the Channel with the British Expeditionary Force in July 1914. A month later he was badly wounded near Mons – possibly he was one of the men left behind that troubled Walter Cook’s uncle Robert so much and led to Walter’s enlistment – captured and taken to a military hospital in Cologne, from where he was transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in Magdeburg.

Two years into his internment, Campbell learned that his mother was gravely ill back home in Gravesend. Helpless and frustrated behind the wire of a prison camp far from home, and with nothing to lose, he wrote a letter to the Kaiser asking to be granted permission to see his mother one last time. Campbell must have been surprised to receive a reply at all, let alone one in which the German monarch granted him two weeks’ leave from the camp, relying on his honour as an officer to ensure his return within the time allowed.

Campbell made his way back to Kent by train and boat via the Netherlands, arriving home on 7 November to spend a week in Gravesend with his ailing parent. Captain Campbell was sure to depart again in good time to honour the terms of the Kaiser’s dispensation and returned to Germany to see out the remainder of the war in the Magdeburg camp. Mrs Campbell died eight weeks later.

Leaving Gravesend I rejoined Watling Street at Strood, walked along the western bank of the Medway, turned left over the bridge and crossed to Rochester, its castle high on a promontory before me as the ancient town woke up, stretched and prepared to embark on a warm spring Saturday. Skirting the centre, I turned along the riverside esplanade and followed the Medway south. On the outskirts of Rochester I was at last able to leave the sole-bruising hardness of tarmac and paving stone to join the waymarked North Downs Way, the national trail that would escort me the remaining fifty-odd miles to Dover and the English Channel. It was a steady climb onto the Downs, passing the churned chalky grey of recently ploughed fields, until in a break in the trees that lined the path I spied Kit’s Coty, a trio of ancient standing stones topped by a large, heavy capstone just off the path at the edge of a field.

This is purportedly the location of a great battle that took place in the middle of the fifth century, at which Vortigern and his forces took on the Jute army of Hengist and Horsa, whose assistance he had solicited for his own domestic power struggles only for the Jutes to decide they quite fancied sticking around and running the place themselves. The ‘Kit’ of the name is thought to come from Catigern, a son of Vortigern, who died on the battlefield that day and whose grave the ‘coty’ is purported to be. It is definitely an ancient grave of some kind: a barrow some seventy feet in length used to be visible until centuries of ploughing levelled the ground, leaving this clutch of ancient stones encased by railings at the edge of the field as the only apparent remnant of a battle that no one is actually certain even took place. Its mysterious provenance has made the Coty an attraction for visitors for centuries: George Orwell passed by in the 1930s, while Samuel Pepys pronounced it ‘a thing of great antiquity and I am mightily glad to see it’.

It’s an incongruous sight, this pi symbol in three dimensions: a grave from a possibly mythical fight in a farmer’s field high on the North Downs. There’s even some doubt that Vortigern and his sons even existed, making this visit to Kit’s Coty practically the antithesis of my own quest. Here was an event and people whose lives and stories might possibly have been conjured from thin air, or loosely based on facts, that had lasted through many centuries, while I was making a journey to find someone who had certainly existed, yet had passed entirely from memory within a generation of his death.

In the afternoon I rested for a while on a bench at the top of the village of Detling, next to its RAF memorial, before pressing on, passing through some of Kent’s – and England’s – most beautiful countryside. I had found a good walking rhythm at this stage and my steps and breathing were in perfect tandem, creating an almost trance-like state in which I rarely looked up from a spot on the road a few yards in front of me. The miles and hours were disappearing under my feet on a flat, single-track road, as I headed east between rape fields of deep-green stalks sprinkled lightly with yellow that would be ablaze with colour a week or two hence.

After what must have been a good hour or more after leaving Detling, I lifted my gaze from the tarmac in front of me and was stopped dead in my tracks. I’m not usually one for postcard representations of England. For me, a suburban street of terraced houses with a Mace on the corner evokes England as much as an ivy-clad thatched cottage with a well in the garden, but the sight that greeted me there on the road somewhere in Kent was enough to terminate my walking rhythm and bring me to a toe-crunching halt.

The day was easing towards late afternoon and the fledgling shadows were just gaining the confidence to commence lengthening. In the field to my right two horses, one brown, one white, grazed lazily, the late afternoon sun warming every detail and contour of their bodies. Behind them, the white-tipped conical roofs of two oast houses peeped over some trees, while in the distance a square church tower interrupted the hazy horizon. Above the idyllic scene was a bright-blue canopy marked only with a few cotton-wool puffs of cloud. Somewhere up there, a skylark was singing its tiny lungs out as, in the distance, the church bell began to ring.

This was just the kind of idyll for which the soldiers were told they were fighting: the classic image of England, the type of scene crying out for a soundtrack by Vaughan Williams and captured by generations of painters. It was a vista that had remained unchanged for a good couple of centuries, the same bell tolling for generations, the same birdsong from the heavens, the same shadows stretching across the grass year after year. I stood for a while, watching nothing in particular yet watching everything: history, nature and society in a view utterly devoid of people but which has somehow come to define a people.

Once I’d got moving again, perhaps lulled too far by this watercolour perfection and having spied on the map a dotted green line that represented a more direct public footpath route to Harrietsham, I left the waymarked security of the North Downs Way to struggle clumsily across a recently ploughed field. Too accustomed to the well-trodden, signposted trail, I’d been tempted into a shortcut, one I messed up and led to me straying unawares into a wood that turned out to be private property. Ahead of me I heard the throaty rumble of a quad bike on which a man dressed in a green sweatshirt and combat trousers appeared, pulled up, switched off the engine and regarded me as if he’d just walked into his living room and found me sitting in his favourite armchair flicking through the television channels. Fortunately his initial save-it-for-the-judge-bucko demeanour as I explained where I thought I was soon gave way to a helpful point in the direction of the public footpath I’d believed I was on. Thankfully he’d realised he was just dealing with an incompetent buffoon with barely cursory map-reading skills rather than someone intent on pilfering birds’ eggs or putting on some kind of free festival. He even gave me a cheery ‘happy hiking’ as he gunned the quad bike and plunged back into the undergrowth.

Once on the right path – which turned out to be ankle-deep in mud – I arrived in Harrietsham just as the shadows disappeared into the twilight and lights were winking on behind thick cottage walls. The weatherboarded Roebuck Inn was blue-white in the gloom, and I stayed there the night, my feet sore and my face tingling from the unseasonably warm weather. Warm though it was – strangely so for late March – even in the height of summer the fate of the long-distance walker is such that one is forced to crank up the radiators to ensure the underwear and socks rinsed out in the sink are dry by the morning.

It was another sunny day as I headed out of the village the next morning to pick up the trail. After half a mile or so I came upon a bench, at one end of which sat a full-sized wooden sculpture of a fat friar cheerfully asleep, with his head resting in his hand to remind you that this path was also part of the ancient Pilgrim’s Way. I sat with him for a while, looking out across the valley as the Sunday morning church bells echoed around the villages, and could easily have joined him in a morning snooze if I hadn’t needed to be in Wye by sunset.

Late in the afternoon I stopped to rest at a ruined church by a lake below a grand old house. All that remained were a tower, a small section of wall and a tiny side chapel. St Mary’s, Eastwell, dates back to the fifteenth century, and the flint-built tower in front of me was part of this original construction. It was a peaceful, shady spot and I ended up staying longer than I’d anticipated, poking around the graveyard, reading the stones and just sitting looking through the trees to the lake and listening to the birdsong echoing from inside a belfry long ago relieved of its bells.

I was sitting on a stone slab that, judging by the remains of the walls around me, was once inside the main body of the church. St Mary’s had been badly damaged during the Second World War, then all but abandoned afterwards. In earlier times it would have been the place of worship for the family and workers of the Eastwell Place estate, but presumably an evolving social structure and the impact of the Second World War had seen the congregation decline almost to nothing. When the roof fell in in 1951 repair seemed pointless. The nave and everything but the tower, the small stretch of wall and the little chapel were demolished and removed in 1956, leaving just a tranquil ruin to be gently reclaimed by nature.

I didn’t realise until I stood up to leave, but the slab on which I’d been resting my weary bottom was actually the key to the greatest story associated with St Mary’s. It’s a rectangular rubble-brick construction with a flat stone top, on the front of which is a plaque that’s quite hard to decipher unless you squat down in front of it and look closely, to read: ‘Reputed to be the tomb of Richard Plantagenet, 22 December 1550’.

Richard Plantagenet, who was born around 1470, was an illegitimate son of Richard III, a boy raised in isolation, living and working with a tutor with very occasional visits from a man dressed in fine clothes the only break in the routine of endless one-to-one study. One day in 1485 the teenage Richard was hurriedly dressed by the tutor, put onto a horse and taken on a long journey that ended at a field in Leicestershire full of tents and apprehensive-looking soldiers: this was the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field, the ultimate showdown of the Wars of the Roses. Young Richard was shown into the grandest tent of them all, where someone he recognised as the man who had been visiting him for as long as he could remember introduced himself as his father. If that wasn’t surprise enough for someone who had met few people other than the old boy who drummed Latin declensions into him, the man in the tent continued, ‘My boy, I am the King of England today, but heaven knows what I may be tomorrow, for the rebels are strong. If the Earl of Richmond wins the day he will seek out Plantagenets wherever they may be and crush them. Tell no one, absolutely no one, who you are unless I am victorious.’ This was to be Richard’s last meeting and only conversation with his father.

The following day’s battle brought a bloody end to the reign of the Plantagenets in England, and when news filtered back from the fight that his father had been killed, the younger Richard immediately made himself scarce. He fled to London and commenced an apprenticeship as a stonemason, a trade he would continue for the rest of his life.

In 1540 Sir Thomas Moyle employed an elderly mason in the building of his home and estate at Eastwell Place, a man who would stay working on the project for a full ten years until his death. Moyle noticed that the older man stayed aloof from the rest of the builders and masons, and he became, from a distance, fascinated by this enigmatic, faintly melancholy old workman. It was some time in the mid-1540s, when Moyle noticed the mason reading a text in Latin – most unusual for a labouring man – that he engaged him in conversation and eventually coaxed Richard’s story out of him. On hearing of Richard’s royal connections Moyle allowed this last of the Plantagenets to build himself a small cottage on the estate in which to live out his final years. He was buried on the estate and the tomb where I’d parked my rear end is his reputed last resting place.

It’s a terrific story and one that I find myself hoping to be true. But as I looked at the tomb in what would have once been the nave of the church, I was well aware that wishing something to be true doesn’t make it so. I thought about Richard and I thought about Catigern of Kit’s Coty, both victims in different ways of wars and battles, and both possibly nothing like the men of their respective legends. These mythologies made me think about Edward: in a way I was mythologising him by trying to recreate his story and fashion his personality. Through the character traits and personal attributes I was attaching to him every time I imagined his experiences, I was creating a myth. The sketchy account of the basic movements of his regiment in the 10th Queen’s Royal West Surreys’ war diary provided the only clues I had to where he was and what he was doing in his final months, and even that was vague. I had no idea where Edward had been or what he was doing, and certainly I had no idea about who he actually was. Most disappointingly of all, I had no idea how, where or why he died. Was he single-handedly charging a machine-gun post and saving countless lives in exchange for his own? Was he taken out by an artillery shell while advancing across no man’s land? Did he absent-mindedly stick his head above the trench parapet just as a sniper fixed him in his sights? Was his death heroic, tragic or even comic? At the back of my mind I was even starting to wonder whether the decades of silence that followed his end had something to do with the nature of his death. Could he, I wondered, even have been one of the 300 or so British soldiers court-martialled and shot by their own side? Hero, traitor, coward or deserter, I reminded myself that I might never know for certain the truth behind Edward’s final days and death. Despite this resignation I still had to be careful not to create a mythology that might be at best misleading and at worst a gross distortion of the truth, even though I might never learn what the truth actually was.

I heaved my rucksack onto my back and set off again, passing Sir Thomas Moyle’s old Eastwell Manor, now inevitably a hotel and conference centre, and walked up the hill towards the village green of Boughton Aluph.