Then we were all through and the laughing stopped.
There's nowt to laugh at out there. It's a wasteland. Used to be trees but after the big raid last summer, they blew them all to hell, roots and all, and when it rains for a week, like it's been doing, the holes all fill with water and the ground gets so clarty, you can feel it sucking you down. Smells too. Don't know why it should. It were once good mixed woodland like what's still there. But now it stinks like a ploughed-up boneyard.
Someone — don't know who — said, 'This is bloody stupid. We should head back.' Seconded, I thought. But I kept my trap shut 'cos if there's one thing guaranteed to make Cap head east, it's hearing me speak up for west. I should've known better than to try diplomacy. It never works. Might as well start scrapping right off and get it over with. Cap just glowered at me as if it had been me mouthing off, and said, 'Follow me. Keep close.' And we were off, no pretence of a discussion. Whatever happened to universal suffrage?
God, it were hard going. Two steps forward, one back, and as for keeping close, with that rain coming down and the mist coming up, it was all you could do to see where your next step were going to land, let alone keep an eye on anybody else. So it came as no surprise when somewhere over to the left I heard a splash and yell and a voice crying 'Oh shit!' all spluttery. Someone had gone into a crater. My money was on Jacksie, but I didn't waste time speculating. Even someone a lot better coordinated could drown in one of them holes as easy as the middle of the Atlantic. So I headed for the noise like everybody else. Only I must've been a bit more headstrong than the rest 'cos when I got there, I didn't stop but slid right over the edge, and next thing, I were down the bleeding hole too!
For a while I thought I were going to drown, but once I got the right way up and persuaded Jacksie — I'd been right about that — to stop grabbing my hair, I realized there were only two or three feet of water down there, which was fine so long as you didn't lose your footing. The real problem was how to get out, 'cos the walls started sloshing and crumbling every time you tried to get a hold on them.
Cap and the others had arrived by now and were reaching down to grab us. They got Jacksie first and I pushed like mad and got nowt but a faceful of boot for my pains. But eventually the useless bugger got hauled out and it were my turn. I reached up and felt someone get a hold of my right hand, I couldn't see who, my eyes were so full of mud and water, and I thrashed around with my left till finally I found another hand to get hold of. Then, kicking my toes into the side, I started to haul myself out.
I soon caught on I were getting a lot of help with my right hand — turned out to be Cap who were doing the pulling — but nowt at all with my left. But before I could start wondering why, my feet slipped out of the hole I'd kicked in the side of the crater and my hand slipped out of Cap's, and I started to slide back in, putting all my weight on whoever had got a hold of my left hand.
And it just came away, the hand I was holding on to I mean. And I slid right back down into that filthy water with my fingers still grasped tight around that thing, or like it seemed then, with that thing's fingers still grasped tight round mine, and I started to scream, and some on the others started to scream too, and eventually even them buggers in the green uniforms started taking notice, and next thing there was a whole platoon of them all around us shouting and shoving and that's how we ended up getting captured. Me ciggies are all sodden. You've not got a dry one, have you?
iii
Families are a fuck-up, thought Peter Pascoe.
Otherwise, how come he was standing here in a crematorium chapel with all the inspirational ambience of a McDonald's though without, thank God, the attendant grilled burger odours, being glared at by his sister, Myra, and squinted at by a bunch of geriatric myopes, as he attempted an extempore exordium of a grandmother he hadn't seen for nearly two years?
'Hello. I'm Peter Pascoe and Ada was my grandmother and I'm doing this because..'
Because when he'd arrived and discovered Myra had ordered a full-fig C of E service right down to 'Abide With Me', his guilt had vaulted him onto a high horse and he'd gone through the arrangements like Jesus through the money changers, till at his moment of triumph Myra had brought him crashing to earth with the question, 'OK, smartarse, just what are you going to do?'
'… because as you probably know, Ada didn't reckon much to organized religion. She always said that when she died the last thing she wanted was a funeral-chasing parson droning on about her unlikely virtues. So I'm doing it instead. . not droning on, I hope. . and not unlikely. . anyway, I'm doing it.'
And a right cockup you're making of it too. He could see Myra's fury moderating into malicious pleasure. If only there'd been time to make a few notes. Only a fool relied on divine inspiration when he'd just dumped God!
'Well I'm not going to make a lot of notes… I mean, fuss, because Ada hated fuss. But equally I'm not going to let the passing of this remarkable old lady pass un … er. . remarked.'
This got worse! Pull yourself together. If you can brief a bunch of CID cynics and pissed-off plods, no need to be fazed by a pewful of wrinklies. What was Myra rolling her eyeballs at? Doesn't she know a dramatic pause when she hears one?
'Ada was born in Yorkshire though she didn't stay there long. The event which changed her life, changed all our lives, come to think of it, was the Great War. So many died. . millions.. numbers too large to register. One of them was Ada's father, my great-grandfather. After she got the news, my great-grandmother took her three-year-old daughter and headed down here to
Warwickshire. I've no details of how they lived. I only discovered the Yorkshire connection because I was a nosy kid. Ada wasn't one to go on about the past, maybe because there was too much pain in it for her. But I can guess that one-parent families had it even tougher in those days than they do now. Anyway here they came and here they stayed. This was where Ada grew up and in her turn got married. And in her turn she had a child. And in her turn she saw her husband, my grandfather Colin Pascoe, go off to the wars.
'Did she know as she said goodbye that in her turn she too was never going to see him again? Who knows? But I think she knew. Oh yes. I'm sure she knew.'
That had them. Even Myra was looking rapt..
The child they had was, of course, Peter, my father. Naturally he wishes he could be here today. But as you probably know when he took early retirement a few years back, he decided to follow my eldest sister, Susan, and her family out to Australia, and unfortunately urgent commitments have prevented any of them from making the long journey. But I'm sure we will be very much in their thoughts at this sad time.'
He caught Myra's eye and looked away, but not before they'd shared their awareness that any thoughts turning their way in that antipodean night would probably need the attention of an oneiromantist.
'So in 1942 Ada got the same news from North Africa that in 1917 her mother had got from Flanders. Another young widow. Another fatherless child. No wonder she hated uniforms and wars and anything which seemed to be celebrating them. She could never look at an Armistice Day poppy without feeling physically sick, and one of her last cogent acts was to rebuke a British Legion volunteer who came round the ward selling them.'
Rebuke? What she'd actually said according to Myra was, 'Sod off, ghoul.' Which message it might appear he was passing on to this well-poppied congregation. Ah well. You can't please all of the people all of the time.
'But Ada did not let the past destroy her present. She joined one of the accelerated teacher training courses after the war and despite her late start, she climbed high, finishing as Head of Redstones Junior which I myself had the privilege of attending. As you can imagine, having your gran as head teacher was a mixed blessing. Certainly in school I got no favours, just a first-class education. But outside, I got all the love and indulgence a growing boy is entitled to expect from his gran.'