1996: The History Project
Unpublished short story, written 1996.
It was a bright May afternoon as Mr Richardson headed the car towards the outskirts of the town. But despite the cheerful weather he seemed determined to be quarrelsome. His teenage daughter had cajoled him into going out of his way to give her a lift, and he was anxious to exact a price in return.
‘Treaty of Campo-Formio, 1797’, he said. ‘I learnt that twenty-five years ago and I can still remember it.’
‘Great,’ said Deborah. ‘Who was it a treaty between?’
‘Well, you have got me there,’ admitted her father. ‘But what I mean is, sending kids out to do interviews isn’t history, it’s market research. What we did in those days was real history. Facts. Dates. Something useful.’
‘Really?’ enquired Deborah. ‘And how often do you need to remember the Treaty of Formo-Campio? Does it help sell insurance policies?’
‘The battle of Trafalgar came up in the pub quiz last week,’ countered Mr Richardson, now sounding distinctly impatient.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Deborah, with an irony that lost its force through being too laboured; ‘Real vocational education; real training for a productive lifetime. Study history to win trivia quizzes. Education for life – prepare yourself for the pub.’
Fortunately they had now arrived at their destination. ‘I’ll drop you here, at the end of the road,’ said Mr Richardson, ‘I’ve got to work.’
With a muttered word of thanks Deborah jumped out of the car. She saw the sign pointing to Woodlands Grove Old People’s Home, and slowly began to walk down the tree‑lined avenue. She consulted her watch and saw that she was in good time. She could afford to wander slowly, revelling in the sunshine as she did so.
Her purpose in visiting the Old People’s Home was to conduct an interview for the project which made up forty per cent of her A-Level History assessment. It had not been Deborah’s first choice for a topic. She had wanted to do something on changing attitudes to family planning in the 1970s, but her history teacher, Miss Davies, very rapidly jumped on that.
‘It’s much too recent, and too controversial,’ she had said in the arrogant, squawking tone which had almost driven Deborah to take Economics instead. ‘The First World War is a much safer subject. We know the facts and we agree what we think about the facts. And there are still people alive who can fill in the details, and help us make the picture even clearer.’
So Deborah had been stuck with the First World War. She had read All Quiet on the Western Front and Good-bye to All That, as well as looking at the standard text-books and watching a couple of videos about life in the trenches. Now she had reached the research component. She was going to interview a survivor of the Great War.
There weren’t many of them left in the 1990s. Even someone who had been eighteen in the last year of the war would be ninety-five now. But Deborah had been to see Mr Plumm, the Secretary of the Local History Society, and he had produced a list of names from his overflowing filing cabinet.
It was rather a battered list, with a lot of crossings-out which rather unceremoniously recorded the fact of death. But Mr Plumm peered through his spectacles and picked out a name: Mr William Martlow, aged 97, now resident at Woodlands Grove. He examined a scrawled pencil mark next to the old man’s name. ‘I can’t quite make that out,’ he said, ‘I think it says NCO – that was Non-Commissioned Officer. The NCOs had a lot of responsibility, so if you can get him to talk, he’ll be a very valuable source of information.’
Deborah had phoned the matron of Woodlands Grove to find out if Mr Martlow was still alive and of sound mind, and whether he would be willing to be interviewed. The matron assured Deborah of Mr Martlow’s good health – ‘he’s very frail, of course, but he’s quite coherent – a lot more coherent than some of those ten years younger. He still watches the news on television every night. I’m sure he’ll be happy to talk to you.’
The matron had spoken to Mr Martlow and rung Deborah back to make an appointment, an appointment she was now keeping. Deborah was a diligent student. She had made a list of questions to ask in her notebook, and had checked the batteries in her tape-recorder.
The matron greeted her in a friendly manner, asking Deborah the details of her coming examinations and recounting her own daughter’s academic career.
‘It’s such a beautiful day that he’s sitting out in the garden. It’ll be best if you take one of these folding chairs and go and talk to him there.’ She ushered Deborah through the building and out into the back garden, where neatly kept beds were resplendent with flowers.
‘This is Mr Martlow,’ she said. Deborah looked at the object of her research, and saw a small figure, flesh hanging loose on his face, slumped back in an armchair. His eyes were closed, and even from a couple of yards away his breathing was quite imperceptible. Deborah wondered whether in fact he was dead. Any sense of compassion she might have felt was drowned out by irritation at a wasted journey, a wasted journey imposed by Miss Davies, who had forced this unrewarding subject on her.
But the matron gently took hold of Mr Martlow’s shoulder, and roused him. For a moment he appeared dazed, shaking off the dreams of the past. As soon as his eye fell on Deborah he came to fully, looking alert and wholly composed.
‘This is Deborah Richardson’, said the matron, ‘the young lady who wants to interview you for her school project.’ She disappeared, leaving them alone together. Other residents were scattered around the gardens, but all seemed to be asleep.
‘I’m sorry I can’t stand to shake your hand,’ said the old man, ‘but my back gives me a lot of pain.’
‘Of course,’ smiled Deborah, adopting the polite manner she was quite capable of, though her parents and teachers might have been surprised to see it in operation. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr Martlow.’
‘Call me Bill,’ said the old man. ‘It’s not often that I get to meet a young lady. I’ve got four granddaughters, but they don’t bother to come and talk to me.’
As she looked at the old man’s face Deborah saw to her surprise a definite flicker of lust take momentary shape, and then disappear. Undeterred, she took out her note-pad, switched on her tape-recorder, and began the questions.
‘Can you tell me something about life in the trenches?’ she asked.
‘The trenches,’ he repeated, and fell silent until Deborah began to worry that he had gone back to sleep. Would she dare shake him by the shoulder as the matron had done? But after a few seconds the voice resumed:
‘It was a terrible thing, to send all those young men into the trenches. Some good friends of mine died there… Jim Baker, and Ted… Ted…’ The old man searched his brain for his friend’s second name, but failing to find it, moved on.
‘They talk about war crimes and war crimes tribunals, but I’ve always thought it was war itself that was the crime. What interest did we young fellows have in fighting Germany? We’d never met a German. Didn’t have too good an idea where Germany was, to tell you the truth. They went on about atrocities in Belgium, but of course we found out later they’d all been invented. Bit like the Gulf War, you know.’
Deborah, who could scarcely remember the Gulf War, began to feel a little frustrated. She knew you couldn’t expect old people to come to the point straightaway, and of course it was understandable that he would feel like that about war after what he had gone through; but it was all so impersonal – general opinions, not the personal detail she needed for her project.
‘Can you tell me anything about your own experiences?’ she asked. But Bill was still chasing an elusive memory. ‘Ted Cousins, that was his name; died on the Somme in 1916. Stupid Generals, sitting miles behind the front, sending young men to their death. And Ted’s brother, Peter; he never got over what he saw at the front. He was in an asylum for twenty‑nine years after the war before he died. I used to go and see him, but he never recognised me. It was as if he had tried so hard to forget he couldn’t remember anyone.’
Deborah looked at her list of questions, but felt increasingly helpless as the old man carried on with his memories, oblivious of her academic needs.
‘Were you injured at all?’ she asked.
‘Injured,’ repeated the old man. ‘I was that. Thrown downstairs by two soldiers, and broke my arm. Then they said it was my fault, so I got a week in a cell on my own, with nothing but bread and water. I still sometimes dream I’m in that cell.’
Deborah was confused by this. All her prepared questions seemed to be irrelevant in face of what the old man was saying. The familiar details about the trenches that she had expected to hear – rats, lice, shells, snipers, food, brave young officers – what had happened to them? She tried frantically to adapt to what she was actually hearing.
‘Were you a prisoner of war, then?’
‘A prisoner of war.’ The old man seemed to taste the phrase, to run it round his mouth to see if he liked it. ‘A prisoner of war. I suppose I was… I suppose I was.’
Was he wandering? Had she lost any hope of getting a clear, coherent response from him? She tried to jog his mind back to concrete reality.
‘I suppose the German guards were very cruel to you.’
The old man gazed back at her with a look in which bewilderment seemed to border on contempt. But there could be no doubt that he was fully conscious of what he was saying.
‘Germans? What are you on about? I was in a British jail, a military jail. It was British soldiers who broke my arm.’ And he gave a slight wince as the fingers of his left hand strayed to his right elbow.
Deborah was now utterly lost. She gazed at her notes, but there was nothing that could cover the direction the conversation was now taking. Fortunately the old man himself continued the story, clarifying the situation.
‘I was a Conscientious Objector. That’s what I did in their war – their so-called ‘Great’ War. I came before the tribunal in 1917 and was put in a British military jail. They’d have liked to send me to the front and then have me shot for disobedience, but they couldn’t get away with it.’
There had been a paragraph about so-called ‘conchies’ in one of the text-books; Deborah’s head filled with images of white feathers; but she could hardly ask the old man if he had been a coward and too scared to fight. She tried to reconcile what she was hearing with the information given so confidently by Mr Plumm.
‘But I was told you’d been an NCO. It was marked against your name on the list I saw.’
The old man’s answer was sharp as a razor. ‘Not NCO. CO. C – O. Conscientious Objector. I couldn’t stop the slaughter, but at least I can say I didn’t add my twopennyworth to it. I suppose that’s something to have a bit of pride in.’
And as Deborah’s tape-recorder continued to run, the old man recounted his story. The anarchists he had associated with as a boy, the shock of the outbreak of war, how he had tried to persuade his friends who were a year or two older not to volunteer. Then the tribunal and the confinement to a British military prison, the insults and physical attacks from the soldiers set to guard them, and how they had managed to talk to the soldiers and even persuade some of them of the justness of their cause.
‘There were sixteen thousand of us, remember; of those seventy-three died and forty went mad. Not much when you think of the millions who were killed, but at least we knew what we were doing it for.’
He paused for a moment. ‘Didn’t achieve much, I suppose. When I look at the television, and see them still fighting, I have to admit we failed. Not much I can do now. I used to go on the big peace marches, you know, from Aldermaston, though I was getting to be an old man even then. Still, there’s no blood on my hands. We’ll see if your lot can do any better.’
His voice was drowsy and Deborah could see he wanted to sleep again. She thanked him and took her leave, shaking his hand; then, as an afterthought, she kissed him lightly on the forehead. He seemed to be dreaming again already, and she hoped she might assuage his undead lust.
As she made her way back up the tree-lined avenue, she wondered what Miss Davies’ reaction would be. She could hear her screeching: ‘Too controversial. You’d better find a more typical veteran to interview.’ But she knew now that history was not the private property of history-teachers. Bill Martlow’s memory would stay with her until she too was sprawled in the sunshine, being interviewed by some child less than one fifth her age.
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Unpublished short story, written 1996.
********************************************************
It was a bright May afternoon as Mr Richardson headed the car towards the outskirts of the town. But despite the cheerful weather he seemed determined to be quarrelsome. His teenage daughter had cajoled him into going out of his way to give her a lift, and he was anxious to exact a price in return.
‘Treaty of Campo-Formio, 1797’, he said. ‘I learnt that twenty-five years ago and I can still remember it.’
‘Great,’ said Deborah. ‘Who was it a treaty between?’
‘Well, you have got me there,’ admitted her father. ‘But what I mean is, sending kids out to do interviews isn’t history, it’s market research. What we did in those days was real history. Facts. Dates. Something useful.’
‘Really?’ enquired Deborah. ‘And how often do you need to remember the Treaty of Formo-Campio? Does it help sell insurance policies?’
‘The battle of Trafalgar came up in the pub quiz last week,’ countered Mr Richardson, now sounding distinctly impatient.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Deborah, with an irony that lost its force through being too laboured; ‘Real vocational education; real training for a productive lifetime. Study history to win trivia quizzes. Education for life – prepare yourself for the pub.’
Fortunately they had now arrived at their destination. ‘I’ll drop you here, at the end of the road,’ said Mr Richardson, ‘I’ve got to work.’
With a muttered word of thanks Deborah jumped out of the car. She saw the sign pointing to Woodlands Grove Old People’s Home, and slowly began to walk down the tree‑lined avenue. She consulted her watch and saw that she was in good time. She could afford to wander slowly, revelling in the sunshine as she did so.
Her purpose in visiting the Old People’s Home was to conduct an interview for the project which made up forty per cent of her A-Level History assessment. It had not been Deborah’s first choice for a topic. She had wanted to do something on changing attitudes to family planning in the 1970s, but her history teacher, Miss Davies, very rapidly jumped on that.
‘It’s much too recent, and too controversial,’ she had said in the arrogant, squawking tone which had almost driven Deborah to take Economics instead. ‘The First World War is a much safer subject. We know the facts and we agree what we think about the facts. And there are still people alive who can fill in the details, and help us make the picture even clearer.’
So Deborah had been stuck with the First World War. She had read All Quiet on the Western Front and Good-bye to All That, as well as looking at the standard text-books and watching a couple of videos about life in the trenches. Now she had reached the research component. She was going to interview a survivor of the Great War.
There weren’t many of them left in the 1990s. Even someone who had been eighteen in the last year of the war would be ninety-five now. But Deborah had been to see Mr Plumm, the Secretary of the Local History Society, and he had produced a list of names from his overflowing filing cabinet.
It was rather a battered list, with a lot of crossings-out which rather unceremoniously recorded the fact of death. But Mr Plumm peered through his spectacles and picked out a name: Mr William Martlow, aged 97, now resident at Woodlands Grove. He examined a scrawled pencil mark next to the old man’s name. ‘I can’t quite make that out,’ he said, ‘I think it says NCO – that was Non-Commissioned Officer. The NCOs had a lot of responsibility, so if you can get him to talk, he’ll be a very valuable source of information.’
Deborah had phoned the matron of Woodlands Grove to find out if Mr Martlow was still alive and of sound mind, and whether he would be willing to be interviewed. The matron assured Deborah of Mr Martlow’s good health – ‘he’s very frail, of course, but he’s quite coherent – a lot more coherent than some of those ten years younger. He still watches the news on television every night. I’m sure he’ll be happy to talk to you.’
The matron had spoken to Mr Martlow and rung Deborah back to make an appointment, an appointment she was now keeping. Deborah was a diligent student. She had made a list of questions to ask in her notebook, and had checked the batteries in her tape-recorder.
The matron greeted her in a friendly manner, asking Deborah the details of her coming examinations and recounting her own daughter’s academic career.
‘It’s such a beautiful day that he’s sitting out in the garden. It’ll be best if you take one of these folding chairs and go and talk to him there.’ She ushered Deborah through the building and out into the back garden, where neatly kept beds were resplendent with flowers.
‘This is Mr Martlow,’ she said. Deborah looked at the object of her research, and saw a small figure, flesh hanging loose on his face, slumped back in an armchair. His eyes were closed, and even from a couple of yards away his breathing was quite imperceptible. Deborah wondered whether in fact he was dead. Any sense of compassion she might have felt was drowned out by irritation at a wasted journey, a wasted journey imposed by Miss Davies, who had forced this unrewarding subject on her.
But the matron gently took hold of Mr Martlow’s shoulder, and roused him. For a moment he appeared dazed, shaking off the dreams of the past. As soon as his eye fell on Deborah he came to fully, looking alert and wholly composed.
‘This is Deborah Richardson’, said the matron, ‘the young lady who wants to interview you for her school project.’ She disappeared, leaving them alone together. Other residents were scattered around the gardens, but all seemed to be asleep.
‘I’m sorry I can’t stand to shake your hand,’ said the old man, ‘but my back gives me a lot of pain.’
‘Of course,’ smiled Deborah, adopting the polite manner she was quite capable of, though her parents and teachers might have been surprised to see it in operation. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr Martlow.’
‘Call me Bill,’ said the old man. ‘It’s not often that I get to meet a young lady. I’ve got four granddaughters, but they don’t bother to come and talk to me.’
As she looked at the old man’s face Deborah saw to her surprise a definite flicker of lust take momentary shape, and then disappear. Undeterred, she took out her note-pad, switched on her tape-recorder, and began the questions.
‘Can you tell me something about life in the trenches?’ she asked.
‘The trenches,’ he repeated, and fell silent until Deborah began to worry that he had gone back to sleep. Would she dare shake him by the shoulder as the matron had done? But after a few seconds the voice resumed:
‘It was a terrible thing, to send all those young men into the trenches. Some good friends of mine died there… Jim Baker, and Ted… Ted…’ The old man searched his brain for his friend’s second name, but failing to find it, moved on.
‘They talk about war crimes and war crimes tribunals, but I’ve always thought it was war itself that was the crime. What interest did we young fellows have in fighting Germany? We’d never met a German. Didn’t have too good an idea where Germany was, to tell you the truth. They went on about atrocities in Belgium, but of course we found out later they’d all been invented. Bit like the Gulf War, you know.’
Deborah, who could scarcely remember the Gulf War, began to feel a little frustrated. She knew you couldn’t expect old people to come to the point straightaway, and of course it was understandable that he would feel like that about war after what he had gone through; but it was all so impersonal – general opinions, not the personal detail she needed for her project.
‘Can you tell me anything about your own experiences?’ she asked. But Bill was still chasing an elusive memory. ‘Ted Cousins, that was his name; died on the Somme in 1916. Stupid Generals, sitting miles behind the front, sending young men to their death. And Ted’s brother, Peter; he never got over what he saw at the front. He was in an asylum for twenty‑nine years after the war before he died. I used to go and see him, but he never recognised me. It was as if he had tried so hard to forget he couldn’t remember anyone.’
Deborah looked at her list of questions, but felt increasingly helpless as the old man carried on with his memories, oblivious of her academic needs.
‘Were you injured at all?’ she asked.
‘Injured,’ repeated the old man. ‘I was that. Thrown downstairs by two soldiers, and broke my arm. Then they said it was my fault, so I got a week in a cell on my own, with nothing but bread and water. I still sometimes dream I’m in that cell.’
Deborah was confused by this. All her prepared questions seemed to be irrelevant in face of what the old man was saying. The familiar details about the trenches that she had expected to hear – rats, lice, shells, snipers, food, brave young officers – what had happened to them? She tried frantically to adapt to what she was actually hearing.
‘Were you a prisoner of war, then?’
‘A prisoner of war.’ The old man seemed to taste the phrase, to run it round his mouth to see if he liked it. ‘A prisoner of war. I suppose I was… I suppose I was.’
Was he wandering? Had she lost any hope of getting a clear, coherent response from him? She tried to jog his mind back to concrete reality.
‘I suppose the German guards were very cruel to you.’
The old man gazed back at her with a look in which bewilderment seemed to border on contempt. But there could be no doubt that he was fully conscious of what he was saying.
‘Germans? What are you on about? I was in a British jail, a military jail. It was British soldiers who broke my arm.’ And he gave a slight wince as the fingers of his left hand strayed to his right elbow.
Deborah was now utterly lost. She gazed at her notes, but there was nothing that could cover the direction the conversation was now taking. Fortunately the old man himself continued the story, clarifying the situation.
‘I was a Conscientious Objector. That’s what I did in their war – their so-called ‘Great’ War. I came before the tribunal in 1917 and was put in a British military jail. They’d have liked to send me to the front and then have me shot for disobedience, but they couldn’t get away with it.’
There had been a paragraph about so-called ‘conchies’ in one of the text-books; Deborah’s head filled with images of white feathers; but she could hardly ask the old man if he had been a coward and too scared to fight. She tried to reconcile what she was hearing with the information given so confidently by Mr Plumm.
‘But I was told you’d been an NCO. It was marked against your name on the list I saw.’
The old man’s answer was sharp as a razor. ‘Not NCO. CO. C – O. Conscientious Objector. I couldn’t stop the slaughter, but at least I can say I didn’t add my twopennyworth to it. I suppose that’s something to have a bit of pride in.’
And as Deborah’s tape-recorder continued to run, the old man recounted his story. The anarchists he had associated with as a boy, the shock of the outbreak of war, how he had tried to persuade his friends who were a year or two older not to volunteer. Then the tribunal and the confinement to a British military prison, the insults and physical attacks from the soldiers set to guard them, and how they had managed to talk to the soldiers and even persuade some of them of the justness of their cause.
‘There were sixteen thousand of us, remember; of those seventy-three died and forty went mad. Not much when you think of the millions who were killed, but at least we knew what we were doing it for.’
He paused for a moment. ‘Didn’t achieve much, I suppose. When I look at the television, and see them still fighting, I have to admit we failed. Not much I can do now. I used to go on the big peace marches, you know, from Aldermaston, though I was getting to be an old man even then. Still, there’s no blood on my hands. We’ll see if your lot can do any better.’
His voice was drowsy and Deborah could see he wanted to sleep again. She thanked him and took her leave, shaking his hand; then, as an afterthought, she kissed him lightly on the forehead. He seemed to be dreaming again already, and she hoped she might assuage his undead lust.
As she made her way back up the tree-lined avenue, she wondered what Miss Davies’ reaction would be. She could hear her screeching: ‘Too controversial. You’d better find a more typical veteran to interview.’ But she knew now that history was not the private property of history-teachers. Bill Martlow’s memory would stay with her until she too was sprawled in the sunshine, being interviewed by some child less than one fifth her age.
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