The First of July(124)

Dad and Jim were all right together and the business was surviving, though never what it used to be. The old man was tetchy because even though folks were still dying and doing it at home and even though some other coffin-makers had failed in the war, he worried and fussed and spent hours over his books as if by adding up the same figures again they might suddenly show a different truth. Yet he’d take no suggestions for expanding, nor even for letting me do the figures in the modern way as they did in London shops. I tried to tell him business was business, no matter what goods it dealt in, but he wouldn’t have it.

I sometimes wondered what had happened to Connie. But what did Connie know? She’d have had me in prison like Isaac Meyer’s brother, being taunted by warders and attacked by prisoners while other lads died for me. Thinking of Isaac, I remembered my promise to write to his family and I remembered it with shame. As I was identified as Isaac for a while, as I was Isaac in the rabbi’s eyes, perhaps they had been told, at first, that he was only injured. My resurrection was his end. How its significance had escaped me, I do not know—thinking only of myself, I expect.

I remembered the simple address, of course. So I took my time on a letter and I was careful to leave out a lot and add a lot more and, by the time I’d finished, Isaac’s death was the best you could hope for. Almost glorious, but not so as they’d wonder why he’d been passed over for a medal and make inquiries. But he was a hero, really, in his way, but not as anyone who’d not been there would think. I said as how I’d been injured and was not fit for work and if I’d been in London as I’d hoped, I’d have come to see them and told them face to face. It was probably true, that bit.

And so things went on in the coffin corps. Low morale. The C.O. failing, the crippled adjutant exasperated and drinking, the trooper a general dogsbody dreaming of his sweetheart. Sometimes I felt pretty desperate. I was useless, unwanted, really, and, to tell the truth, lonely, as I never had been in London.

It must have been the end of 1917 we got two strokes of luck. The first began with the old vicar of Thaxton. He was a widower who’d never recovered from when his boy—an officer in the artillery—had been killed on the Somme around about the same time I’d been injured. He’d sacrificed himself for another officer. “Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life, etc.” It was all very biblical. He’d gotten a medal.

But there was no consoling the father, and a rumor at the Arms said after that it had been nothing but hours of Old Testament, death, and destruction and the flightier members of his flock had gone off to neighboring villages or even Chapel for all they were sorry about his boy. At which point the bishop intervened. Still, the reverend was past all his woe now and to be buried next to his wife, who’d died two years back.

Dad and I went to see the daughter, Miss Chatto. She was a nice young lady, very sad. Then it hit me. Chatto was the officer who’d come to Duke Street and had got me in with the Hunts cyclists. He’d said he came from Devon. It wouldn’t have been right to ask if he was “my” Chatto, so I didn’t. Anyway, he didn’t make it back.

Miss Chatto was talking about how she didn’t want anything showy for her father, him being a modest man of the cloth, but she said it should be nice. So nice we did: polished elm, and a good bit of wood, with a touch of mitering and handles in the classical style. There was no money in it: you could tell she had little, so we did it almost at cost and out of respect. Poor Miss Letitia Chatto had lost her father and her brother and her fiancé as well, Jim heard, a Navy man.

But it was as if God was watching and judging, because a few weeks later we got a good commission from the widow of the mayor, who, it turned out, was in the way of being the Reverend Chatto’s sister-in-law and had heard good of us from the daughter. Only the best would do, she said, even if the old man had heard down in the Arms that she was part German, though you couldn’t tell.

“Guilt,” said my dad. “It’s always guilt when nothing but the best will do.”

The coffin would lie in state in the town hall (Dad snorted on hearing this; he’d never been one for the mayor), then borne through the streets. The whole of Totnes would see it. Trouble was, we didn’t have much of the best left.

“Where’s that fine oak we had way back?” I said. “We had a whole lot of it we bought off a timber merchant back in ’09 or ’10.” When things were going well, was what I didn’t say. It was lovely, fine-grained, seasoned timber. When Mother died, he’d used some for her coffin.