Plagued is a work of fiction, inspired by my grandparents, Thomas John and Mary Ann Haley. I was about ten when I first saw the huge cross-shaped scar on my Pappy’s back and learned how he got it. He acted as if being shot by a sniper while hanging out washing on the Western Front, was nothing much. He blamed the luminous hands on his watch and told me about being taken across France in a cattle truck. Sadly, I never knew Mary, but I got a sense of her from him.
His tale might have remained in my head had my long-suffering husband, Dave Keates, not given me membership to Ancestry.com as a gift. This uncovered other family members with intriguing stories and the beginnings of an idea began to germinate. Even then, facts were thin on the ground. I’d seen the scar and the sliver war badge and knew he’d been in the trenches but not where, or for how long. An educated guess told me he’d probably been taken to Netley Hospital, but the hospital records, like so many from the Great War, were lost. Without the help of Brenda Findlay from Netley Abbey Matters, I might never have known more. She found his name on a list of the wounded; at least we thought it was him.
Then, fate sent me a message from the other side of the world. Kevin Haley, a cousin I’d never met, contacted me through Ancestry. Thomas was his Pappy too. Kevin, Lynn and Katrina in Australia shared their memories of Thomas and Mary. Kevin even had a photograph of Pappy in his uniform, taken in 1914. The cap badge and the stripes on his sleeves proved I had the right Thomas Haley. Now I had a date and, with help from the Royal Hampshire Regiment website, I was able to build up a picture of where he might have been and what battles he might have been involved in.
Information about the Spanish Flu pandemic in England was hard to come by. What little I knew came from Pappy’s story of his daughter Freda, playing in the morning and dead in the afternoon. Catherine Arnold’s interesting book about the 1918 Pandemic was a great help, as was the National Library of Medicine. Then, when I was knee deep in research about Spanish Flu, a new pandemic appeared and provided a greater understanding of what it must have been like to live through those dark days of disinformation, cover ups and conspiracies. The book began as Thomas and Mary’s story. From necessity I had to weave the weft of facts I’d uncovered through a warp of my imagination and add a sprinkling of fictitious extras to bring the story to life. As I began to write, the characters, both real and fictional, started to take on lives of their own. They became real people who spoke to me in my dreams. Often, they took the story in directions I hadn’t planned but I went along with them, curious to see where they’d lead me. In the end, this is both a true and a fictional account of the last months of the Great War and the forgotten pandemic. It is also a tribute to all the women who suffered the uncertainty of waiting at home, all the victims of the Spanish Flu and all the soldiers, whether they died in those foreign fields, or survived to relive them to the end of their days. They couldn’t forget what they’d seen and done and we should never forget the sacrifices they made.
Copyright © 2021 Marie Keates
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9798764597195
1 – Thursday 27 June 1918
If Mary could see him now, stirring his underwear in a bubbling dixie of petrol-tainted water, she’d laugh her head off. It was a far cry from any kind of laundry she knew, with no soap or mangle and a metal tin precariously perched over four stubby candles in the dark instead of the copper boiler she used at home. That he was attempting the task at all would have amused her, but it wasn’t something he could add to the letter he was trying to write. For a start, he wouldn’t want to mention the bayonet he was using to stir the pot, or the lice he was trying to kill. She didn’t need to be worrying about that kind of thing. The trouble was it was difficult to find anything to write about that wouldn’t make her worry. One way or another, even the most innocuous things tended to end up running to horror, and every letter he wrote could so easily be his last.
This letter had started off well enough, with the glorious day, all bright sun and patches of blue sky, and the green shoots poking their heads up here and there in No Man’s Land. He’d written about the ragged clumps of poppies, cornflowers and white daisies bravely sprouting along the chalky rubble of the parapets, adding splashes of colour to the endless sea of dusty brown and khaki, and he’d been quite poetic about the butterfly he’d seen flitting from one to another. She’d probably laugh about him being called Joe all the time, because of the chalky dust that made them all look the same. It came up in choking clouds whenever they moved and fell again in a gritty layer that coated everything. He and Joe were both short, dark-haired and lean, but Joe fancied himself a handsome devil and acted all offended whenever he was mistakenly called Corporal Brodrick, or Thomas. The letter was all going well until he got to the magpie. He’d heard the rasping call and seen it swoop down somewhere amongst all those green shoots after something shiny, but he daren’t mention the dead man the trinket had once belonged to, or the shot that rang out. She didn’t need to be thinking about a bored German sniper getting his eye in, even if the magpie had flown off unharmed, a flash of black and white against the periwinkle blue. Seeing it escape had pleased him, but, if Mary knew about it, she’d only worry about who the sniper was going to aim at next. He never wrote about that kind of stuff. She didn’t need to know how the snipers picked off anything that moved, or how they’d all learned to keep their heads down or risk losing them. It was easier for short arses like him and Joe, but poor old Lofty said he was developing a dowager’s hump from all the crouching. She’d have laughed at that, too, but he couldn’t write it.
‘Anyone want to have a whip round to get Corporal Brodrick a washboard and an apron?’
Joe interrupted his thoughts. His grin was a flash of white teeth in the gloom as he drained the last drop of tea from his tin mug.
‘No, but I’ve got some smalls he could wash while he’s at it.’ Wally slouched against the earthen wall of the dugout, a Woodbine glued to his lip and his notebook open on his knee. He imagined he was a poet, but the likes of Graves, Owen and Sassoon had little to worry about on that score.
‘If they’re yours they’ll hardly be smalls and, if I hang them out, Jerry’s likely to think it’s a white flag and we’re surrendering.’ Thomas laughed along with them. The mickey taking was just a bit of banter to break the monotony.
‘Oh, I thought it was soup,’ Lofty chuckled and ran the flame of a candle along the seams of his jacket. Like the boiling underwear, this was meant to kill the lice and their eggs, although it was like pissing in the wind. ‘It smells just like the stuff we had yesterday.’
‘Louse soup, the speciality of the house.’ Joe smiled and looked down affectionately at the rat nestled on his lap. Thomas had got a few letters out of Joe’s attempts to tame the creature, despite Wally’s objections. Boredom created strange bedfellows and Ruby the rat, with her beady red eyes, was the closest thing to a pet any of them had. Joe said she was their mascot.
Wally disagreed. ‘I swear that filthy bloody animal is just waiting for you to cop it so it can eat you.’
‘There’s more meat on your bones,’ Joe said, ‘so she’s probably got her eye on you.’
He blew out the candles, lit a cigarette and thought about what else to write. He tried to send a letter every few days, but they’d been in this forward trench for four days now and he hadn’t sent one. Nothing much was happening other than a little gentle strafing and the distant rumble of artillery. He couldn’t tell her that and he was running out of material. Last time they were here he’d told her about the dugout, a cave-like place the size of a box room, with a tarpaulin across the doorway to keep the dim light of the Tilley lamp inside. He’d waxed lyrical about the earthy, musty smell of damp that permeated everything but he hadn’t mentioned the stink of unwashed, flatulent men, Wally being the prime example of the latter. For now, this was home and his real home, the terraced house by the river, was like a beautiful, barely remembered dream. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought of Mary’s fine-boned face, her chestnut curls and her eyes the blue of a summer sky. Six years they’d been married, and he still couldn’t quite believe his luck. Of course, he’d only been at home for two of them, which might explain why she hadn’t thrown him out on the street yet.
‘Just four more days of this, if we’re lucky.’ Wally dragged him back to the present. ‘Then we can go back to the support line.’
They’d settled into a kind of torpid routine. There’d been no action for weeks and the only hospital cases they’d had were all the chaps who’d caught the flu. Though all they’d needed was a few days rest and they were as right as rain.
‘It’s the billets after that I’m looking forward to. There’s a little mademoiselle waiting for me in that village,’ Joe said with something between a leer and a wink.
‘This quiet can’t last.’ Wally licked the end of his pencil, squinted and wrote a few words. ‘They’re building up the ammo. There’s a big storm brewing, mark my words.’
‘Perhaps it’ll turn around and this next push will be the last?’ Even as he said it, Thomas knew it was rubbish.
‘How many times have we said that?’ Joe snorted.
He was right. When the Yanks and the tanks came, they said it would all be over soon, but they’d had tanks since the summer of ‘16 and Yanks since last spring, yet here they were still, barely fifty miles from where they’d been at the start. When it did kick off again there was no guarantee any of them would make it through to see the end. All they could hope was that death would be quick and relatively painless, something like a bullet through the head would do nicely.
‘It could be worse,’ Joe said. ‘It could be raining like it was when we were here by the Somme in ‘16.’
‘I’m glad I missed that,’ Lofty said. ‘The snow was bad enough.’
‘I’m not sure what I hate the most, the mud or this chalky bloody dust.’ Thomas stubbed out his cigarette and began to fish his underwear from the pot with the bayonet.
Joe laughed at his attempts to wring out the clothes without burning his hands. The underwear was still hot and stank of petrol from the cans all their water came in. They drank the stuff, cleaned their teeth in it, cooked in it and even shaved with it. He must have consumed so much petrol by now he ought to have a starting handle fitted to his chest to make him run. Still, between the heat, the water and the petrol, his underwear should be louse free for a little while. As he moved about, the Tilley lamp flickered and cast towering shadows on the drab walls. Sometimes it felt as if all the men they’d lost lingered in the gloom watching them. Like thoughts of home, they were never far from his mind.
He took the dripping washing out into the darkness of the trench. If Mary could see him now, she’d probably wonder why he was hanging his clothes out in the dark when it had been such a perfect drying day. There was so much about this place she would never understand, especially how they’d all become more or less nocturnal, as it wasn’t safe to move about much in the daylight. The silvery blue glow of the moon gave him just enough light to fumble his way towards the makeshift washing line they’d rigged up between two dugouts. He reached up into the shadows and felt around for the line. He got the undershirt over and managed to skewer it in a couple of places with the dolly pegs Mary had sent him. As he lifted his left arm to hang his underpants, he caught sight of the hands of his watch glowing in the darkness, five and twenty to midnight. A second later, a blow from behind, like a cricket bat to the back, sent him to his knees gasping. What had happened? Why couldn’t he get his breath? A sickening panic knotted his stomach. He struggled to inhale. Blood pounded in his ears. Then the edges of the world turned black.He took the dripping washing out into the darkness of the trench. If Mary could see him now, she’d probably wonder why he was hanging his clothes out in the dark when it had been such a perfect drying day. There was so much about this place she would never understand, especially how they’d all become more or less nocturnal, as it wasn’t safe to move about much in the daylight. The silvery blue glow of the moon gave him just enough light to fumble his way towards the makeshift washing line they’d rigged up between two dugouts. He reached up into the shadows and felt around for the line. He got the undershirt over and managed to skewer it in a couple of places with the dolly pegs Mary had sent him. As he lifted his left arm to hang his underpants, he caught sight of the hands of his watch glowing in the darkness, five and twenty to midnight. A second later, a blow from behind, like a cricket bat to the back, sent him to his knees gasping. What had happened? Why couldn’t he get his breath? A sickening panic knotted his stomach. He struggled to inhale. Blood pounded in his ears. Then the edges of the world turned black.
When he opened his eyes again, it was still dark, but he could see he was on a station platform. A row of blanket-covered wrecks stretched off in each direction. With a sense of abandonment, he watched the long goods train slowly move away. Then he noticed the station sign: Amiens. They’d barely moved from the trench where he’d been shot. Home receded into the distance, a cruel trick, a promise snatched away. Would he ever see it again? Nurses’ skirts and aprons swished past as they checked on the men. Did the poor things ever get the chance to sleep or rest? Occasionally, stretcher-bearers were summoned to take someone away. The selection appeared random. Were they dead, dying or being taken to some other place? At any moment, he expected to die or to be carted off, too. He was tired of the struggle to breathe, tired of this war. Desolate, he closed his eyes and waited to die.
2 – Monday 1 July 1918
Mary rolled up her sleeves, began to sort the laundry and smiled at Freda singing her version of a nursery rhyme to her beloved rag doll, Tilly.
‘Mary, Mary little fairy, cows in the garden go, with silver bells and cockerel smells and pretty maids, ho, ho, ho . . .’
She sat on the flagstone floor cradling the doll in her arms like a baby. A sunbeam slanted through the open door and turned her short blonde hair into a halo around her head. Mary tried to memorise the words of the song so she could write them in her next letter to Thomas. He liked to hear about the children; he’d missed so much of their lives, especially Freda’s. He was already in France when she was born, and he’d only had one lot of leave since.
By the time Alice appeared at the door, the battered old copper boiler had started to bubble. At the sight of her, Freda danced out into the garden in search of Alice’s son Harold. The two of them would keep each other amused while she and Alice got on with washing the clothes.
‘Is Hetty not back yet?’ Alice tutted. ‘I don’t know why she takes so long or why either of you bother, come to that. Eric and George could walk to school with Gordon. He’s quite sensible enough to make sure they use the railway bridge rather than crossing the track.’
She plonked her washing basket on the kitchen table. Her clothes were already neatly sorted into separate piles. Everything about Alice was neat and tidy, right down to her auburn hair, wrapped in a green-spotted scarf made from the same fabric as her apron.
‘Then Hetty would have to do her share of the work,’ Mary sniggered, as she began to put the whites into the copper.
‘Remind me again why we asked her to join our little laundry club?’
Alice began to pile the coloured clothes into the tin bath. She was always smiling. Thomas’s brother Harry said it was her dimples, her green eyes and her red hair that had attracted him to her, in that exact order.
‘Many hands make light work. Besides, it’d be rude for us not to include her, especially when we walk through her back garden to get to each other’s sculleries.’
Irritating as Hetty could be, Mary felt sorry for her. Being a Titanic widow was a hard life. Thomas had had a notion to give up his baker’s round and join the Titanic as a steward. He’d always had a hankering to travel, and the White Star money was good – at least the tips were. If the coal strike hadn’t put so many men out of work, he might have got the job and she might have been a Titanic widow too. Barely a street in the town was untouched by the disaster. There were three other widows in this road alone. Of course, they didn’t harp on about it as much as Hetty.
Even with the back door open, laundry was a moist, hot job, especially on this sultry summer morning. The vapour settled on everything; it fogged the glass doors of the dresser and little rivulets of soap-scented condensation ran down the walls. By the time Hetty finally deigned to make an appearance, Mary had transferred hot soapy water into the tin bath and begun to pound all the coloured clothes with the wooden dolly. Alice was busy filling buckets with cold rinsing water. Hetty’s job was to run the clothes through the mangle. It didn’t much matter that she’d taken so long to get back, but the way she faffed about as she pinned her long dark plait up onto her head and fussed tying her apron over her broad hips annoyed Mary. She couldn’t just get on with the task at hand, either; she had to pass comment on everything.
‘Look at the size of these.’ Hetty held up a pair of Zillah’s old-fashioned bloomers. ‘I don’t know why we do her stuff. It’s not as if any of us is behind with the rent, or beholden to her. You’re not behind with the rent are you, Mary?’
‘Of course not. She’s your landlady, not mine, and the poor old thing has no one else to help her. Besides, there’s never much of it.’
‘What about that son of hers, the bank manager?’ Hetty turned the mangle handle furiously.
‘Well, he’s hardly going to do her laundry, is he?’ Alice straightened up and rubbed the small of her back. ‘For a start, imagine if he saw those bloomers. He’d probably have heart failure.’
‘He’s got enough money to pay someone, though,’ Hetty said. ‘In fact, by rights, he should pay us. He’s too much of a tight arse.’
‘Have you heard anything from Thomas?’ Alice changed the subject before Hetty really got on her high horse. She had a bee in her bonnet about Zillah’s son for some reason, and once she got going there was no stopping her.
‘His last letter was all about their billets in a village somewhere. I’m not sure if he’s still there now. It sounds like a very strange place, even without the war. He says the French women paint their faces but, when they smile, most have terrible black teeth. Apparently, they drink coffee instead of tea, too, and eat cakes for breakfast. Can you imagine?’
As always, Mary and Alice did the bulk of the work, but every bit of help made it go faster, so they couldn’t complain. Unlike Hetty, who seemed to thrive on grumbles.
‘So much for rationing putting paid to shortages and queues, that was just a load of bunkum,’ Hetty muttered as she turned the mangle handle. ‘There’s no cheese to be had for love nor money. Hours and hours I queued on Friday, and me with my feet, too. You know how I suffer. All that time standing out in the open in pain and terrified of the Zeppelins or the Gothas coming. I could have been killed.’
‘Zeppelins and Gothas?’ Mary couldn’t suppress her laughter. ‘There have never been any air raids here.’
‘I don’t think they can get this far, lovely.’ Alice poured another bucket of water into the tin bath. ‘Besides, if they could you’d probably be safer outside in the open.’
‘They’ve bombed London and Kent and goodness knows where else.’ Hetty folded her arms across her chest and stuck out her pointy chin haughtily. ‘They even tried to get Portsmouth Docks. Who’s to say they won’t bomb us? Anyhow, whether they can or they can’t, I was afraid, and my feet were hurting. Then, after all that, there was no cheese. When they sent all the farmers off to war, they never gave a thought to us. Don’t even get me started on the stuff they call bread these days. We’ll all be starved before this stupid war is over, if the Zeppelins don’t get us first. Then there’s the U-boats to worry about.’
‘U-boats? Why are you worried about U-boats?’ Alice raised an eyebrow.
‘Well, they keep sinking ships, obviously.’
‘But you’re not going on a ship, Hetty.’
Mary swore she liked to complain about things so much she looked around for extra things to worry over.
‘No, but the food we eat comes here on ships, doesn’t it? Stuff like sugar and tea. If they keep sinking ships, we’ll have even less to eat.’ She pushed back a damp strand of hair impatiently. ‘Don’t forget the Lusitania. She was full of women and children, but did they care? No, they sank her. They even sink the hospital ships. Remember Asturias last spring? Young Bobby across the road died when she went down. Only last week a U-boat torpedoed another one. I forget its name, but nearly all the wounded soldiers and the nurses were killed, not to mention the crew. Imagine surviving getting wounded and thinking you were going to be fine because you were being sent home, only to have that happen. Poor buggers. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘My Harry is in the navy and so is his brother, Hariph.’ Alice straightened up and put her hands on her hips. ‘I’d rather not think about ships being torpedoed thank you very much.’
‘Have you heard anything from him?’ Mary tried to change the subject.
‘Nothing lately, his letters have likely got caught up in the post. I’ll probably get lots all at once. You know how it is. You wait and wait for a letter, half afraid it’s going to be from the War Office. Then when one does come, it’s only really proof they were alive at the time they wrote it.’
For once, Alice had no smile. Hetty and her talk about U-boats had rattled her. She didn’t mean anything by it, she just didn’t think before she opened her mouth.
‘It’s awful not knowing what’s happening to them, isn’t it? The other night, I dreamed I got a letter from the War Office . . .’
Mary shuddered at the memory. It had been in her head ever since. Unable to drift off again, she’d crept out of bed, leaving Freda peacefully asleep in her cot, her thumb in her mouth, the other hand rhythmically stroking the blanket. The moon had cast an eerie light through the bedroom window and turned her into a ghost child, with blue-white skin and silver hair. It made the dream seem more of an omen.
‘You worry too much. I’m sure Thomas will be fine, and so will my Harry.’
‘If I were you, I’d be more concerned about those French women with their red lips and black teeth,’ Hetty said.
‘Thomas would never . . .’ Mary gasped.
‘It was only a joke,’ Hetty replied, as if it should have been obvious.
There was a knock at the door and Mary went to answer it, still fuming at Hetty’s comment. Her heart froze when she saw the post boy on the step. She shouldn’t have said anything about that dream because now she’d made it come true. Even before the thin envelope was in her hands, she could see the official stamp and the words ‘On His Majesty’s Service.’ Reluctantly, she took it from the poor boy. He couldn’t even look her in the eye and didn’t hang around to see what happened next. In a daze, Mary staggered back to the scullery. She fumbled with the envelope. Her hands shook so much she had trouble opening the seal. After a couple of deep breaths, she looked at the flimsy sheet of paper.
‘I regret to inform you that a report has been received from the War Office that Corporal Thomas Brodrick . . .’
Mary’s hands flew to her mouth. The letter fluttered to the floor and Alice and Hetty stopped work and stared at her.
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