16. Echoes of War

THE POETESS part 16

Harry came as a grisly shock because it was clearly the decaying last remnants of a human being that I had turned over as I dug where I wanted my flower bed to be. In my imagination it was all set to be beautiful, and there was nothing remotely beautiful about this sad collection of old bones.

Fortunately I was not alone at the time. Mr Babbage had turned up to see how I was getting on. He was showing a great deal of interest in my cottage, and I was about to find out that hidden in the folds of history there was a reason why.

Mr Babbage stared with interest at the pile of human remains that I had unearthed as if he suspected more than he was prepared to say for the time being.

“I wonder,” he muttered slowly to himself, and then he pulled himself together and suggested that the police should be informed. “They might be the remains of a murder,” he said, “though I don’t think they are, personally. Wait on here and I’ll go and call the police because that’s what we should do.”

“A murder?” Rosie asked, horrified. Suddenly the blackest oif black clouds was descending onto my perfect cottage. Suddenly what had promised a lifetime of happiness had been tarnished.

“You’ve got to ask yourself why someone was buried in a garden like that,” he said, “I reckon I know why. I even believe I know who it might have been, but I’ve still got to notify the police. Just in case I’m wrong.”

“It’s so sad,” she whimpered as Mr Babbage (she still called him that and didn’t yet know his Christian name) started his car and manoeuvred it so that he could drive away. “I’ll not be long,” he called from his open window as he disappeared from the sight.

Rosie stood for what seemed ages staring at the sad pile of bones before turning to make her way back into the cottage. It was beginning to look so inviting, and now the skeletal remains had emerged from where maybe they should have rested for ever and a day. Why in the name of goodness had she decided to dig there, because there was all the rest of that long overgrown lawn she might have chosen?

Slowly she went up the stairs (stairs that were safe now that many of the wooden steps had been replaced with new timber) and into her bedroom. It was already prepared for her to sleep in and she had thought that maybe tonight she could sleep in her own home for the very first time. The idea had excited her, and then she’d taken a spade to her garden.

And then came the bones and the shadow that they cast on everything. However hard she tried to .wish them away, they remained in her inner eyes, haunting her

Mr Babbage was as good as his word and she had barely had time to fling herself into the bed with a sob in her throat than he returned.

The expression on her face must have betrayed her feelings.

“I’ll tell you about it,” he told her, sympathetically, “it’s quite a sad story, but there’s no danger in it.”

“I called him Harry,” she whispered, “the skull, the bones: I called him Harry.

“Then you must have second sight!” he exclaimed. “I popped into the police station and saw an old friend of mine who was around when Harry Smithson was interred in the back garden of his home, by permission of the council.”

“Harry Smithson?” she whispered.

“He died around fifty years ago, in 1920, but that was just the end of the story, and a rotten end it was too for a brave man.”

“So he’s been lying there for half a century?” whispered Rosie.

“He has. He was a soldier on the Western Front in the first war, and he saw things that no man should ever have to see. I won’t go into what might have changed him, but there was a lot of rotten cruelty, the stuff of war, around then, men being blown to smithereens, body parts blasted as if they didn’t matter. And he saw it all, and when he returned he couldn’t stop seeing those things with his mind’s eyes and imagining that it was still going on. Every slight sound he heard brought something back and tormented him. He had nightmares every night for the rest of his life, which wasn’t going to be long because he couldn’t take it. Some time in 1920 he managed to put an end to his torment by taking his own life when his wife Edna wasn’t looking.

“She went to the council and demanded the right to have him interred in her own garden where she could keep an eye on him even in death. He’d ruined himself, supposedly for the country, and now it could care for him. That was fifty years ago and nobody knew exactly where his body was placed because she buried him by herself, in secret, not wanting anyone else to touch him, and there he must have lain until you started preparing for a flower bed.”

“I see,” she whispered.

“That war was a bloody awful affair, politicians who could hide from the guns sending endless waves of young men to their deaths and staying well back, counting the numbers of the dead. But it wasn’t just the dead. Harry Smithson was more a victim of its bloody insanity than any decapitated youth gazing sightlessly from his hole in the mud. I’ve never really known what the conflict was really about, though it was started by a single bullet when a crown prince was shot on the streets of Sarajevo.”

“We were taught about it when I was at school,” whispered Rosie, “I suppose it’s what really turned me on to poetry in the first place, the poets who wrote about what they saw. Wilfred Owen, and others.”

“Anyway, the police will pop in to check that your bones are what they believe them to be, and then, if you don’t mind, they might suggest you rebury them. Harry was a hero and deserves more than to be forgotten.”

“I don’t feel so bad about it now that I know the truth,” she whispered.

And I didn’t. I made a box for what was left of Harry out of wood … there was plenty of spare wood lying around and I knew how to use a hammer and nails! Then I buried that box deep in the earth where I wanted my flowers to bloom, and decided there and then, that my flower bed would be a memorial for Harry Smithson, a brave and most likely unwilling victim of war. And all the young men who died or came back mutilated in body or mind, or both.

I did some research and what Mr Babbage told me was true in every detail and I was only too please to keep the memory of a soldier sent into an impossible war alive. Even now my memorial in flowers is pretty in my garden, and the poppies I planted, the poppies that come back every year, are red as Harry’s blood when he’d plainly had enough of living.

Funny that I called him Harry when I hadn’t heard his story…

The elderly Rosie Pinkerton made her way to the window and looked out. The flower bed in her garden was lovely, but to her eyes the poppies were the loveliest of all.

© Peter Rogerson 22.03.21

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