Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
PART ONE
Chapter 101
Chapter 100
Chapter 99
Chapter 98
Chapter 97
Chapter 96
Chapter 95
Chapter 94
Chapter 93
Chapter 92
Chapter 91
Chapter 90
Chapter 89
Chapter 88
Chapter 87
Chapter 86
Chapter 85
Chapter 84
Chapter 83
Chapter 82
Chapter 81
Chapter 80
Chapter 79
Chapter 78
Chapter 77
Chapter 76
Chapter 75
Chapter 74
Chapter 73
Chapter 72
Chapter 71
Chapter 70
Chapter 69
Chapter 68
Chapter 67
Chapter 66
Chapter 65
Chapter 64
Chapter 63
Chapter 62
Chapter 61
Chapter 60
Chapter 59
Chapter 58
Chapter 57
Chapter 56
Chapter 55
Chapter 54
Chapter 53
Chapter 52
Chapter 51
PART TWO
Chapter 50
Chapter 49
Chapter 48
Chapter 46
Chapter 45
Chapter 44
Chapter 43
Chapter 42
Chapter 41
Chapter 40
Chapter 39
Chapter 38
Chapter 37
Chapter 36
Chapter 35
Chapter 34
Chapter 33
Chapter 32
Chapter 31
Chapter 30
Chapter 29
Chapter 28
Chapter 27
Chapter 26
Chapter 25
Chapter 24
Chapter 23
Chapter 22
Chapter 21
Chapter 20
Chapter 19
Chapter 18
Chapter 17
Chapter 16
Chapter 15
Chapter 14
Chapter 13
Chapter 12
Chapter 11
Chapter 10
Chapter 9
Chapter 8
Chapter 7
Chapter 6
Chapter 5
Chapter 4
Chapter 3
Chapter 2
Chapter 1
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Marcus Sedgwick
Copyright Page
For Fiona Kennedy,
my superb editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following for their assistance with the research for this book: Helen Pugh and the staff of the Red Cross Museum and Archives Department, the helpful members of staff at the Imperial War Museum, Martin Nimmo and Sue Rubenstein of mybrightonandhove.org, and Elizabeth Garrett, for her invaluable research into Clifton Terrace, and Brighton in general, in 1916.
I have found many books invaluable for capturing the spirit of the time, including Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and Chronicle of Youth, Enid Bagnold’s A Diary Without Dates, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That and Captain Dunn’s The War the Infantry Knew. A Brief Jolly Change, the diaries of Henry Peerless, edited by Edward Fenton, was not only informative, but delightful to me, since it features members of my own family.
So, believe me, or not,
What does it matter now?
Fate works its way,
And soon you will stand and say,
my words were true.
AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon
PART ONE
101
I was five when I first saw the future. Now I am seventeen.
I can’t remember much about it. Or maybe I should say I couldn’t remember much about it, until now.
For years all I could recall was laughter, nervous laughter, and later, silence, then later still, anger. I felt ashamed, guilty, hurt when I thought about it, but I had quite forgotten what it was. Or rather, I had made myself forget.
Memories, half hidden for twelve years, have started to surface, in bits and pieces, until I see a picture of that day long ago, when I was just a little girl.
We weren’t living in Clifton Terrace then, with my wonderful view of the sea, but I don’t know where we did live. There was a big garden, bigger than the one we have here. I was playing in this garden with another girl about my own age. Edgar and Tom were young then too, and even played with us sometimes when they weren’t trying to fall out of the big cooking-apple tree.
It was summer, and the girl and I were best friends. Her name was Clare, and she was the daughter of friends of my parents. It was a long and happy afternoon, but eventually it was time for Clare to go home.
And this is the part I had pushed away and hidden in the depths of my memory for so many years.
I was standing in the hall, giggling with Clare while grown-up chat buzzed above our heads.
Then I said something. I said something that stopped the grown-ups talking and started the silence.
“Why does Clare have to die?” I asked.
Because no one said anything, I thought they hadn’t heard me, so I tried again.
“I don’t want Clare to die tomorrow.”
Then they did start talking, and I knew they had heard, because Mother was scolding me, and Clare started crying and her mother took her away.
I was wrong. Clare didn’t die next day. But I was only five, and, I suppose, didn’t understand that tomorrow meant something more specific than soon.
Soon, however, I was right. Clare died of tuberculosis. It came quickly and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. I can remember very clearly now wishing I could have helped her. Stopped her dying.
Then the silence started.
Not long after, we moved house, here to Clifton Terrace, and gradually I forgot all about that day when I was five.
Until now.
100
I have seen the future again, and it is death. I can no longer pretend it is my imagination.
I wasn’t sure. That I had dreamt about something that came to be might just have been a coincidence. It was a month ago that I dreamt George had been killed. The morning after my dream Father was reading the Times at breakfast.
“George Yates,” he said, without looking up. “That’s Edgar’s friend, isn’t it?”
Mother nodded.
Father read from the paper, still without looking up.
“ ‘Captain George Yates died of wounds, Vermelles, September 26, 1915.’ ”
I was too shocked to know what to think.
“Poor George,” said Tom.
“Poor Edgar,” Mother said, thinking of her other son. Her elder son, away somewhere in France.
Clumsily she began stacking the plates from breakfast. Tom, my other brother, rose to help her.
“Edgar is fine,” Father said. “He’s a strong young man.”
Now he looked up from his paper for the first time, to fix his eyes on Tom.
“And where’s that blasted girl?” he went on, meaning Molly, our maid. “Don’t we pay her enough to do that?”
Tom ignored him and carried the plates out to the kitchen.
“No harm will co
me to the strong,” Father said. “The brave.”
He started to read the casualty lists again. I don’t know why he has to do it. He spends all day with the sick and the dying in the hospital.
“Where is Molly?” Father snapped.
“Cook’s away and Molly’s busy,” said Mother.
“Alexandra,” Father sighed. “Help your brother.”
I jumped up and tried to lend a hand, but I could only think about George. He had been at the front; he had been killed. That was not unusual, not anymore. But I had dreamt that it had happened, the night before news of it had reached us.
Was that possible?
Over the following days I tried not to dwell on it.
I continued my studies during the day with Miss Garrett and in the evenings I sat with Mother. She’s always busy organizing her circle of friends, as well as running the house, and Cook, and Molly, who’s sweet, but scatterbrained.
I tried again to persuade Father to let me help around the wards, but still he refused. He says it’s not fitting for a girl like me, and once his mind is made up, it usually stays that way.
Although I tried to forget George, I couldn’t. Images of his death came to me; I don’t know where from. One morning I was sitting at my mirror, brushing my hair and thinking how long it was getting, when into my head came a picture of George’s mother reading the telegram that gave her the news. I saw George caught on the wire, the barbed wire of the no-man’s-land between our trenches and the enemy’s. But that may have been my imagination. I don’t know how he died.
I was frightened, but the days passed and I told myself it was a coincidence. Thousands of men are being killed in France each week, and the fact that I dreamt about the death of one of them could be nothing more than chance. I even wondered whether I might have already heard about George’s death and not taken it in. Maybe it had already been posted in the lists and Father had missed it. It seemed unlikely, but I clung to this explanation until time allowed me to put it to one corner of my mind, if not to forget about it entirely.
But after what happened yesterday, I can no longer pretend it is my imagination.
Mother and I were walking down Middle Street. We passed the Hippodrome, where I used to love to go to see the circus when I was little. I dawdled outside, remembering a silly act we’d seen there once featuring Dinky, the high-diving dog. Mother pulled my hand.
“Come on, Sasha,” she said. Sometimes she still uses my pet name, as though I’m her little Russian princess.
The sea was in front of us. It’s late October, and there was a grim gray sky above us. Waves were being whipped against the seawall by fierce winds. As so often, the town was full of soldiers; a mass of khaki uniforms.
We would have walked up to the hospital to see Father, but it looked as if it might start to rain any moment. People scurried past us; a horse and empty cart hurried for home, its driver glancing nervously at the sky.
“We’ll take the tram,” Mother said, so we turned and cut through to the Old Steine, to the stop outside Marlborough House.
There was a long queue. Everything was perfectly ordinary as we waited for the tram. When it arrived the ladies jostled a little to be first on, but in a good-tempered way.
Mother looked at the gathering clouds.
“Come on,” she said, taking my hand.
“No,” I said.
She glanced round at me, surprised.
“Don’t play games, Alexandra, I’m cold and it’s about to rain.”
“I’m not,” I said.
I didn’t know what was wrong.
I just knew I didn’t want to be on the tram. That I mustn’t be on it.
A soldier waiting behind us was impatient.
“Come on, darling,” he said, “get a move on.”
But I didn’t move.
I could see Mother was embarrassed. The soldier pushed past, bumping into me as he got onto the tram. He spun round on the step. I stared straight into his eyes.
“Sorry, gorgeous, can’t hang about,” he said. There was a cheeky smile on his lips, but as he looked at me, the smile lost its life, and died on his face.
I knew he was going to die. I don’t know what else I can say. I saw it. Not in France, not in the war, but soon. Here.
“Are you feeling all right?” Mother said, not cross now, thinking I was unwell.
“I don’t want to go on the tram.”
“Sasha . . . ,” Mother began, and then stopped. She sighed.
People pushed onto the tram, but the soldier stood on the step, still looking at me. Mother saw him, and I think it was that, and no other reason, that made her let me have my way. I knew what she thought about “rough” men.
“We’ll walk,” she said, and the tram moved off.
As it went, the soldier was still staring at me.
I watched it go. Mother tugged at my arm, impatiently, but I couldn’t move. It was as though I was rooted to the spot. It all happened very slowly then. But somehow very quickly too. The tram got up to speed and rumbled away toward Grand Parade.
The rain began to lash down then, very suddenly.
A wheel lifted from the tracks somehow, on a point, maybe. The tram came off the rails and lay down on one side with a tremendous crash. It hit a wall and there was a shower of sparks and rubble.
I was aware of noise all around us. The noise of the tram hitting the wall seemed to take the longest time to reach us, and to be the quietest sound. The sound of screaming was the loudest.
Mother finally dragged me away. Last night, before I went to bed, I asked her why we had left, and she told me that there was nothing we could have done. That lots of people, too many, perhaps, had immediately swarmed around the tram to help others off. The police had arrived, and ambulance cars took the injured to the Royal Sussex, where Father used to work until he was put in charge of the Dyke Road hospital. I still feel I should have done something. I should have helped.
This morning I read in the paper that most people in the accident had not been too badly hurt, but that one man had been killed.
A soldier.
Thinking back to yesterday, I remember feeling one emotion from my mother. Fear. But not fear of the accident.
Although she doesn’t know that I have remembered, I know what she’s thinking about. She’s thinking about a day long ago, when I was five.
99
War. That’s all there seems to be.
It’s all around us. Nothing is unaffected by it, no one is immune. Everyone has suffered, everyone has lost someone, or at least knows someone who has. There seems to be little else in the newspapers, little that anyone talks about.
It is over a year now since the war began, but it seems no time at all since I sat listening to my brothers arguing about it, and with Father, too. I was sixteen then, and not supposed to have an opinion. But I sat and listened, in the corner of the room, while they talked. It may have been the actual day we declared war on Germany.
Edgar and Father were very excited, Tom was quiet.
“You don’t want to enlist in the ranks,” Father said to Edgar. “You can take a commission. With your OTC experience you’ll be snapped up.”
“It would have been better if I was a regular already,” Edgar said. “It’ll all be over before I get there. By the time I get a commission and hang around on a parade ground for months, it’ll all be over.”
“Then better you don’t delay. Move quickly and you’ll get your share of the glory.”
I was listening to Father, but I was watching Tom. Edgar and Father stood by the dining room table, poring over the morning’s Times.
Tom was gazing out at the sea lapping way beyond the West Pier, his thin frame silhouetted by a bright summer’s sun outside. It made me think as I often did that it was hard to imagine my two brothers were related. Edgar’s so much bigger, and stronger. He never seems to worry about things, he just does them, whereas Tom worries about everything and everyone. I’m told that on
ce, when I was little, I was crying about a dead bird in the garden, and he put his arm round me and told me that animals go to heaven too. I don’t suppose that’s true, but he wanted to make me happy. That’s how much he worries about people.
Father turned to him.
“Never mind, Tom,” he said. He meant because Tom was still only seventeen, and too young to enlist for almost another year. “You can still go to Officer Training Corps and then you’ll be ready. Maybe the war will still be on.”
“Father!” Edgar exclaimed. “Don’t talk nonsense. That’s the sort of rot the pacifists spout.”
Father didn’t like being spoken to like that, not even by Edgar.
“Edgar,” he said, tersely. “I am simply trying to keep Tom’s chin up. It’s a shame for him to miss out when you’ll be away fighting.”
Edgar glanced at Tom.
“He wouldn’t go anyway,” he snarled. “He’s only too glad he’s too young.”
“What do you mean?” Father said.
“Just what I say.”
“That’s an unkind—” Father began, but Tom interrupted him.
“It’s true,” he said.
That stopped us all for a moment. It was the first time he’d spoken.
“What?” Father spluttered. “You’re not falling for all this Socialist nonsense, are you? I won’t have a pacifist in my house!”
“No, Father,” Tom said. I could see he was scared of Father. “No,” he said. “I’m not a pacifist. But I don’t want to fight.”
Father tried to interrupt, but Tom was brave enough to keep talking.
“I want to train to be a doctor,” he said. “Like you.”
What could Father say to that? He calmed down a bit.
“That’s a good thing, Thomas,” he said. “A good thing. But there’s a war on now. If the occasion arises for you to do your bit, then you must! You will go and fight.”
He seemed to think that was an end to the matter, but I, for some unknown reason, decided to speak.
“Why should he go and fight,” I said, “if he doesn’t want to?”
Edgar turned on me.
“Stupid girl! You don’t understand anything about it. Don’t interfere.”
I wasn’t surprised. Edgar says things like that to me. If he says anything to me at all, that is, these days.