But the two Luxton boys were now equal y dead anyway.
So he had opted for George (it was the more patriotic name), intending to corroborate the matter the next morning, if he had the chance, before his dispatch was sent. There had been much else to concern him that night.
But he never did have the chance, since by seven a.m.
(another radiant summer’s day, with larks), not long after blowing his whistle yet again, and only obeying a futile order that elsewhere along the line had already been cancel ed, Captain Hayes too was dead.
So it was George, not Fred, who got a DCM—which was only one medal down (Vera liked to make this point) from a VC—and neither brother would ever dispute it.
No then-surviving or subsequent member of the Luxton family ever had cause to chal enge what was set down in the citation and carved in stone. No one else had contested it, though no one had suggested, either, that Fred was any sort of slouch. They were both heroes who’d volunteered and died for their country. It was the general, unspoken view of the slowly diminishing group who gathered every November round the Marleston war memorial that al those seven names on it were the names of heroes. Many not on it had been heroes too. There was perhaps a certain communal awkwardness about the local family names that were represented (only the Luxtons featured twice), perhaps even a particular awkwardness about George’s DCM—as if it had been merely attention-seeking of him to capture single-handedly an enemy machine-gun and hold it under impossible odds (so Captain Hayes had written) til he was cut down by crossfire. On the other hand, it would have been in the shabbiest spirit not to honour a thing for what it was. George Luxton and his DCM were in fact the reason why—even long after another world war—many residents of Marleston vil age and its vicinity turned up in November with their poppies when otherwise they might not have done. The Luxtons themselves, of course, were always there. George Luxton (which was not to forget Fred) was the vil age hero and no one (not even Jimmy Merrick of neighbouring Westcott Farm) could deny that he was the Luxtons’ claim to fame.
Only Jack knows, now, how Vera told the story. He never confirmed it expressly with Tom. On the other hand, he had no reason to suppose that Tom didn’t get exactly the same rendition. His mother had given Jack the plain—proud, il ustrious—facts, a man’s story coming from a woman’s lips. And al the better for it, Jack would later think. His dad would have made a mumbling hash of it. At the same time, like some diligent curator, she’d placed the medal itself before him. Jack couldn’t remember how old he’d been, but he’d been too young to recognise that he was going through a rite of passage arranged exclusively for him. It was probably early one November, around the time of Guy Fawkes’ Night, when they’d light a bonfire at the top of Barton Field, his dad (it was stil just the three of them) having splashed it first with paraffin. So in Jack’s mind Remembrance Day was always linked with flames and fireworks.
Whenever it was, his mother hadn’t played up the soldier-boy side of things, nor had she played it down. But when she’d finished, or when Jack had thought she’d finished, she’d added something that, much later, he realised was entirely her own. That was the story of George and Fred, his mother had said, that’s how it was: George won a medal, but they were both brave men. And if, his mother had gone on, those two boys (she’d made the point that they weren’t much more than boys) had made it home together after the war, one with a medal and one not, what would have happened, she felt sure, would have been this. They’d have stopped at the gate up on the Marleston road before walking down the track and George, who had the medal, would have pul ed it from his pocket and would have broken it in two. Then he’d have said, “Before we go any further, Fred, this is for you.” And given his brother half the medal.
“What’s mine is yours,” he’d have said. Then they’d have walked on down the track.
The extraordinary thing was that his mother had told Jack this extra, imaginary bit long before Tom was around—long before, in fact, anyone thought that there would ever be, or could be, a Tom. Jack was Vera’s one and only son. The extraordinary thing also was that you couldn’t break a medal in two. Jack knew this wel enough. Jack had held the medal, then, in whatever size hand he’d had at the time.
He has also held it, much more recently, in his much bigger hand. And what was true years ago was as true now. You couldn’t break it in two. It was made of silver. You couldn’t break it in two even if you took a pair of the strongest pliers to it.
But his mother had said that what might be true for a bar of chocolate could also be true for a medal.
THE LAST TIME Jack stood, wearing a poppy, by that memorial cross in Marleston was in November 1994, and he has every reason to remember it, setting aside that it was Remembrance Day anyway. His father was there with him—or it was more the other way round—but Tom wasn’t there, the first such occasion he’d missed. Tom, who would have been nineteen in just a few weeks’ time, wasn’t around at al , for the simple but, on such a day, highly complicated reason that he was in the army.
It made the inescapable annual attendance at the remembrance service awkward, to say the least, but it was far from being the only burden of that sorry day.
Vera wasn’t there either. She’d been dead by then for some five years. Her grave was in the churchyard close by, and it had become part of the Luxton Remembrance Day ritual that after the service they’d go and stand by it for a moment, wearing their poppies, as if she too might have been mown down on the Somme. That had been duly done
—just Jack and his dad—that day.
Over the others gathered by the memorial there hung, too, an awkwardness or an extra sombreness (though it was a sparkling crisp morning) that owed something to Tom’s absence, but just as much to the devastations that had visited the region’s farms in recent years—to the war stil rumbling on, though the thing had passed its peak, with the cow disease. In many respects, the after-effects were as bad as the outbreak itself. While officials blathered about recovery and “declining incidence,” the human tol was mounting. Perhaps everyone did their best, as every year, to picture for a moment the indescribable battlefields on which those Luxton brothers and others had died, but what came more readily to mind were the cul ings and slaughterings of recent times and the grief and hardship they were stil causing.
You couldn’t real y blame Tom Luxton, in fact, for seeking his future in the army.
Jack remembers that Remembrance Day because it was the last one he attended with his father and because his father, on this occasion, didn’t offer to buy him, as was the regular ritual too, a pint in the Crown afterwards. It was the only day of the year on which Michael would buy his son a drink, doing so with a rather stagy insistence, as if the long-ago deaths of those two lads somehow rested on his conscience. Or perhaps it was more that on this day, with its hal owed meaning for the Luxton family, he liked to make a show in front of the vil age.