Lunchtime in the pub there could be three or four domino schools on the go and a constant drone of banter, gossip. He was invariably there in the winter as we always had a big fire, but he was tolerated by the other players, not liked. They were all of a similar age, but somehow the others looked younger, more hearty, robust and alive. There was the verger and two or three active members of the church and sometimes the vicar would drop in for drink so they knew him well. It was the vicar’s wife who told me that they had moved to the village in the same year, 1953.
I understood their reservations for although he was always extremely polite, and neatly dressed, he was not a man you could warm to for he had a cadaverous, blue veined face with a long pointed, sniffy nose and rheumy eyes. The nails on his long bony fingers were scrupulously clean and meticulously manicured. He had been widowed for twenty three years lived alone and seemed to have no family or friends and seldom had much to say. For sixteen years he had played the organ in the church across the road.
When I became landlord of the pub I inherited the domino players, three dart teams, the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffalos and the 1914 -18 Hot Pot Dinner. This dinner, a tradition handed down since the 1920’s, was for local men who fought in the Great War., those who made it home. It was held every year on or near the eleventh and paid for by the brewery. In my first year 1970, we served twenty three men, some of them domino players, three years on we were down to fifteen. The organist never attended.
In the four years that I had been serving his beer we had only exchanged polite, banal platitudes, but then one February lunchtime in 1974 it all changed. There was a customary lull at the tables for a pee break and he came to the bar, as he always did, on his own. The others bought their drinks in rounds, but he always got his own and would painstakingly count out correct change from a small purse, which I always found irritating. That day there were two young guys standing at the bar discussing a documentary on 20th century warfare that they had seen the previous night. Aware that he must have heard some of their conversation and feeling the need say something as I pulled his pint I said, ‘What do you make of all this talk of war?’ I was not expecting a reply.
‘Oh,’ he said slowly, ‘I don’t much like to think about that sort of thing,’ and then he paused and said slowly, ‘I‘ve been living on borrowed time these last fifty years.’
He paid and went back to his dominos and I was busy with other customers but something about the pause, fifty years, it intrigued me. He didn’t sup fast, so it was probably the best part of forty minutes before he came back for another pint.
‘Fifty odd years is a long time,’ I said as he counted out his change, ‘you’d be a lot younger then.’
As he was about to hand me his money, he hesitated as if deciding whether this required an answer, and then he said, ‘ I were, nineteen when I joined Liverpool Scottish,’ another pause, ‘and I were at the Marne and it were the first time I saw men killed and it weren’t good.’ He returned to his game.
That conversation, such as it was, took place on a Friday and I had a busy weekend but the words lodged in my mind. I looked up the Battle of the Marne and surprised how early it was, September 1914. He was there at the beginning, long before conscription.
Monday lunch came around and he was back in and when he came to the bar I had to ask, ‘How come you were there so early on?’
‘Oh’, he stopped, I can only think living on his own made him speak so slowly, and then he said, ‘I were with ‘territorials’, we were some of the first to go to France, we went over with General Haig.
Over a period of weeks I learned more, as part of BEF he was involved in some serious early action and though he never said it, he must have had some bloody horrendous times. Sometime later he told me…..
‘It were September 1915 when I got my first home leave, and first thing I wanted to do was to go pub to see my mates, but I felt a bit daft going down in uniform so I got changed. I suppose it were cos I were in civvies the young lasses stopped me’, and here there was a longer pause than normal as if reliving the incident, and he said simply, ‘they gave me two white feathers.’
‘What did you say to them?’ I felt outraged and I had also begun to feel a little ashamed I had totally misread this man, ‘books and covers’ came to mind.
‘Oh’, he sighed, ‘I weren’t going to bandy words with them’, he said, and then, ‘I’ve still got ‘em, silly business really, but they weren’t to know.’
Over the next few months I learned that he served four years in the trenches, the, Somme, Passchendaele, right through to the 11th hour of the 11th day and that his best mate, who’d joined up at the same time, was killed in 1918 on the 10th. That’s why never came to the memorial supper, he said it was best forgot, that he just did not want to remember.
On his way home from church he would sometimes call in for a pint and one Sunday he had his bible and there between the pages were two white feathers. It was as much as I could do to choke back the tears. I made an excuse went down the cellar and I cried, for him, all the names on the Menin Gate, and my ignorance.
He died a year later, there were five people at his funeral. There was no mention of WW1 in the short obituary in the local paper.
Sic transit gloria
