Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [58]
‘Yes,’ she agreed. Both of them had seen within their own families, and amongst their neighbours, men who had returned from the trenches so changed, both physically and within themselves, by the horrors they had seen and experienced that they were condemned forever to live within the hell of their memories, isolated from those who loved them.
‘We know that, Sam, but Luke’s young. He doesn’t know what we do.’
It was the wrong thing to say. Immediately he tensed. ‘Well, he should do,’ he answered grimly. ‘I’ve told him often enough what happens to men that go to war. But no, he thinks he knows better, he thinks it’s all medals and glory and wearing a ruddy uniform. He doesn’t know the half of it.’
‘He’s got your pride, Sam, you know that.’
‘Aye, well, his pride won’t do him much good when he’s lying face down in the mud and dead, will it?’ His voice was savage with pain.
Jean started to tremble. Sam’s words were conjuring up an all too vivid picture for her. ‘Don’t say things like that,’ she begged him. ‘I can’t bear the thought of it.’
‘Do you think I can? Ruddy young fool. He could have been here, safe … and still have done summat for the war effort. Doing your bit isn’t just about joining the ruddy army. There’s many a chap worked for the Salvage Corps that’s got more guts – aye, wot’s done more for this city than any ruddy soldier.’
Jean reached out to touch him and Sam pulled away, rejecting her unspoken comfort. He felt things so deeply; Jean knew that, even if no one else did. As a young bride it had upset her dreadfully when his occasional dark moods of unhappiness came down over him, causing him to retreat from her into his own pain and silence, until she had learned to understand how affected he had been both by his elder brother’s death and the fact that he had not been able to join up himself.
‘I never thought it would come to this, Jean, that me own son would look at me like he thought I was a coward.’
‘Luke would never do that, Sam.’
‘Looked at me just like me mam did, when Nellie Jefferies from number eleven give me them white feathers,’ Sam told her, ignoring her protest. ‘Walked off, Mam did, and left me there in the street, she was that ashamed of me, and no wonder. Lost three sons and her hubby Nellie had and there was me walking down the street, when every other lad that lived there had gone off to fight.’
There it was, the real unacknowledged source of Sam’s pain, forced down and locked away and now brought back to festering life, moving Jean to an immediate defence of him.
‘Sam, you were ill. The army wouldn’t take you, and if Nellie Jefferies had had any sense she’d have known that.’
‘It wasn’t just her. Even me own mam thought …’ He stopped and shook his head, his jaw set.
Jean had thought that Sam had got over believing that his mother blamed him in some way for living whilst Reg had died. It was such a long time ago. It worried her to hear him talking about it again now and in that kind of voice. She felt guilty for not recognising how he felt.
‘It’s only natural that this war should bring back memories of the last one, Sam. But …’ she hesitated, groping for the words to say what she felt had to be said without making the situation even worse, and could only come up with a lame, ‘well, that’s all in the past now.’
‘Is it?’ Sam challenged her. ‘How can it be, Jean, when me own son is acting just like me mam did and accusing me of being a coward?’
‘Sam, that’s not true at all,’ Jean denied. ‘Luke never said anything of the kind. And as for your mam …’
Jean had to pause then, remembering that Sam’s mother had never really been as loving towards Sam as her own mother had been to her and her sisters. As the young girl Sam was courting she had simply accepted that Sam’s widowed mother was different from her own much more openly affectionate mum without questioning it. In those days young girls were brought up to respect their elders and she would never have dreamed of criticising Sam’s mother, or even of talking about her, to her own mother. However,