A WAY TO REMEMBER THEM BY

One dark and stormy night in God knows where a man sat down on a stark wooden bench.

The act in itself would seem trivial to most, but for the cursed few, (or perhaps many, too many), who lived as he did, (if one can call it living), it was as heavenly as sinking into a bed of silken sheets and fluffy pillows after a day of punishing toil, and as hallowed as sex with a Goddess.

God! It was good to sit down.

He had been outside for what felt like days, the tenacious rain battering him like pellets, the drops of water that fell from the sky somehow hardened by the atmosphere of demonic brutality that surrounded it, what with the relentless and ruthless cloud of smog that choked the air like a diseased phantom that lived for the pleasure of killing, suffocating everything within a hundred miles of this hell.

It was a fetid mist, that is how one poet, a fine fellow, now as dead as one of Dickens' doornails, had described it. It was the brew of something rotten, in which every sense was sucked into the fog of misery and went to die. It consisted of the odour of gas, sickly, yellow and mustard-like, mixed with the reek of bully beef, that rancid mass of pink meat that looked more like something a dog had devoured and then vomited back up, the texture too raw and repulsive for even the most starving animal to stoop so low as to willingly digest.

Then one could not forget the most pleasant aroma of all, the stench of decomposing corpses, bodies that lay strewn about the landscape like furniture that was out of place, their legs spread in one direction, their arms in another, and that was only for the lucky sods who had their limbs intact, not dispersed over the fields in scattered pieces of fragmented bone and flesh. They stayed there, of course, lying about as if it were normal for them to be there as if they were part of the decor. There was nowhere to bury them, the graves were full and overflowing. Ha! He said resting place, but that was too dignified a term. This was more of a hole in the ground, a hovel that had not yet been dug up as a trench, blasted to the core by cannon fire, or crushed as flat as a pancake by rolling tanks. And even with all that, how was one supposed to get them to their final resting place with an onslaught of assault showering overhead?

The man laughed to himself and it stuck in his throat like a tickle. He did not have a way with words, but assault was the perfect word, right on target, a bullseye. Rubbing his hand along his neck, he sighed. God! The guff of the whole thing was really getting to him. But it was true. It was an assault, because this, all of this hell on earth, it assaulted a man in every way, murdering everything that made him mortal.

And that was just the smell.

There were sights, and sounds, and tastes, and touches too, each one enough to chill you to the core and remain with you forever as a taunting trauma.

His least favourite were the screams. The sound of men dying in the night, their howls like that of a wounded animal as they clawed onto life with each laboured breath that brought them closer to their last. He almost wished that he could take a revolver and point it to the wretches' heads, put them out of their misery with a twitch of his trigger finger, and usher them into their eternal rest. It was the decent thing to do, but he was too cowardly to see it through. Instead, he would stand and stagger through the mud, ignoring the way the sludge crept into his boots through the holes like an assailant and soaked his feet, tarring them with a filthy sludge that had been purified by sick, piss, and less savoury ingredients.

He would stumble through the darkness towards them with unshakable resolve, their sobs his only sense of direction. Thinking again on his analogy, it was not so much that their death cries were like that of a wounded animal. Well, they were, with all their whimpering like a kicked dog and wailing like a newborn babe, but it was worse than that. It was a sound that stabbed at the very soul. It was as if somebody had taken a jagged knife, and not cut, but sawed at your soul as you listened with no choice to that excruciating uproar, and from that secret and sacred place inside you that no doctor could ever find, the essence of who you are would slowly leak out from the wound of grief and disappear from you as it oozed and evaporated, leaving you less. Not less of a man, just less of yourself. The cynical part of him often thought that if somebody clever enough could bottle that symphony of pain, then it would be the best and most brutal tortuous weapon the world had ever known, but thankfully, such an ingenious fellow had not yet come along.

With outstretched hands, he would claw at the sides of the high ditch, his nails scraping the earth, and at last, he would find them. Once he reached their side, all the compassion he possessed in his DNA would compel him to stay with them, doing whatever he could to bring them comfort, the Hale blood in him unable to walk away and leave them to suffer as an abandoned soul to face their wasteful and untimely end alone. He would pray with them, laugh with them, drink with them, swear with them, commiserate with them, but be with them, he would, and then death would show up announced but uninvited, and the cloaked reaper would take them away to dwell with him, but whether as his friend or his foe, he had yet to find out.

After that, he was left with nobody but the rats to talk to, their squeaks loud as they scurried past him or over him in hoards. He could not let them bite him, or else he would be a fevered wreck lying catatonic in a hospital bed before long, and they did not need his pound of flesh, not when they were massive bastards already, the only creatures on this earth who seemed to grow genuinely fat and happy on the spoils of war.

The man sighed.

You must forgive his depressive state, but it had been a long day. A long week, even. Or month, to be fair. In fact, let's call it a long year, a long, heedless, hateful, hideous year, that he wished he could rip from the pages of history, but alas, life was not a book, and unless one is the victor in a conflict like this, one cannot edit or control the narrative of the past, let alone the present, or the future. All he could do was struggle to survive, and hope, that one day, maybe not tomorrow, or the day after, but one day, he could go home. Then again, whether most of him would be allowed to return too, God only knew.

He had been on duty for fourteen hours, and now it was finally his time for rest, a well-earned right to lay down his head before the alarms sounded, and then it would be a case of taking up his rifle and defending his king and country, all for the sake of a measly few inches of land, and that is if they were lucky.

Leaning his head against the wooden wall of the hut, he closed his eyes and put his hand inside his breast pocket. There, his fingers curled around a package, a personal and private bundle that had kept him lucid all these months. Dragging it out, he caressed a parcel that was wrapped carefully in a collection of handkerchiefs to stop it from coming to harm and retaining its blissful ignorance and innocence, each stained patch of cloth bearing the monograms of his four sisters who had cried into them when he had last left the shores of England.

He smiled to himself, and his fingers pulled at the string, revealing a bundle of papers beneath. Blinking, he knew he should sleep. Sleep was sane, sleep was the whetstone that helped to keep a man safe when he needed to keep his wits sharp, but all he wanted to do was read, because in these pages he found solace, in these pages he found home. Sniffing, but whether it be from sorrow, or from the sore that scabbed his nose, he did not know, but either way, the man decided that he would, indeed, read. So he did.

'What you got there, Master?' came a voice from the shadows a few moments later, and his head snapped around and his eyes narrowed in threat since he was constantly on alert for danger. 'I mean mister, no master, no, I mean, I mean ─'

Lifting his lamp, he could see that it was a lad, a scrawny one with pustulated skin and oily hair as red as a carrot. He was sitting hunched and huddled in the corner, his own eyes wide and wild with fright, like a rabbit caught in a motorcar's headlights. He could tell he was just a boy, a pup, a runt, and what was more, he was afraid. Perceiving the way the stranger shivered, the man took his blanket and handed it to the lad, who took it gratefully and wrapped it around his shoulders to appease his shivering.

'I'm nobody's master here, boy,' he said gruffly, his thick, northern inflection difficult to miss. He would have readily picked him up by the scruff of his neck and thrown the boy out of his hut because it was his sanctuary and nobody else's, make no mistake, but he could not bring himself to banish the poor bugger out into the cold night that might well devour him with her icy kiss, sucking the breath of life right out of him.

Eyeing him sagely, he saw that his unsolicited guest was young, abhorrently young. He took in his relatively clean uniform, ample stores of body fat, and how his hands were not yet cut or bruised to the point of disfigurement. Nodding, he guessed that the boy was a novice to the game of war.

'Who are you?' the man asked by way of introduction. He would rather have said nothing and relished the delicious silence, but as his mother had always reminded him, it is rude to ignore people, and after all, manners maketh man.

With chattering teeth, the boy answered: 'Gaskell. Pr ─ pr ─ Private Gaskell.'

'I see,' the older man replied, returning to his seat, this information being all he really needed, because in truth, he did not care who his infantile-looking intruder was, he was just being polite. He had done his bit, he had been gentlemanly, so he need say no more. However, as he would soon discover, the boy had other ideas.

'I ─ I know who you are!' the boy piped up, a strange sort of overwrought animation to his voice as it squeaked like a machine in need of oil.

The man creased his brow irritably. 'Do you now?'

'Aye, I do! You're Lieutenant-Colonel Thornton!' the lad proclaimed excitedly, as if he were addressing the king himself.

The man scowled.

Now that we have learned their names, then perhaps we should dispense with simply calling them the man and the boy, even if the terms remain fitting, because while the former was, in every sense of the word, a man, the latter could equally be the dictionary definition of a boy.

'How did you know that?' Thornton asked, never keen to have his confidentiality invaded in any sort of way. It was one thing for others to raid and annex his country, or so they would try, but it was another thing entirely for them to march upon and occupy his privacy.

'Why, you're famous!' Gaskell laughed incredulously, as if the man did not know. 'Folks all over talk about you, about your bravery. I hear you've won a hundred medals. You must be so courageous, sir, and so clever!' he applauded breathlessly. 'That's why I came looking for you when I knew I was in your battalion. I knew I'd be safe with you,' he explained, and Thornton's heart could not help but swell with a bashful sense of pride.

Shaking his head, Thornton smirked, the corners of his mouth jerking upwards. 'Not a hundred,' he corrected. 'Ninety-nine, maybe,' he joked.

Young Gaskell laughed again, and Thornton discerned the way he looked about him, his eyes awash with dread as he took in the dark and dingy proportions of the slum that they were to call a house.

'I take it you are new here?' he checked.

A swift bob of the head confirmed it. 'Aye, sir. I only arrived yesterday. It…it is not like they say at home, is it?' he mentioned with a sniff as he uttered his glum assessment.

'Not so glamorous. you mean?' Thornton agreed sarcastically, vividly remembering his own shock and horror when he had first arrived. He had not been a guileless idealistic who had romanticised about a noble war, let alone a dignified one, but even he had been shaken to his core to see the carnage that lay around him, and worse, to realise that there was no real plan to get them out of this mess, no glimmer of hope, only despair.

'Aye, it is a sorry place, this hellhole that we have founded in the name of glory, and I would not wish it upon anyone, not even my own worst enemy,' Thornton granted forlornly. 'But we will soon find you comrades, my lad. There are men from my own battalion. You can meet Major Higgins and Captain Boucher, and I have recently had someone transferred to me by request of his father who is about your age, Lance Corporal Lennox, you will like him.'

'By the way, I think I know you, lad,' he added after a minute of studying the boy's familiar-looking face with his well-shaped nose and chocolate eyes that made him oddly hungry. 'Your name, Gaskell, I know it, I've heard it 'afore. Your great-grandmother, was she not the writer?'

'Yes, sir, she was,' Gaskell established enthusiastically, proud as punch of the fact and wishing he had not left his personally signed copy of North and South on the train from Calais. 'Though not as many people read her books as they should.'

'I knew her, I remember her well. She was friends with my grandmother,' he told the boy matter-of-factly, and the whelp gaped in awe at this coincidental news.

'So…what you readin'?' the youngster nagged, getting back to his original question. He jutted out his head in the direction of the stack of what appeared to be papers that formed a book that had not yet been bound.

Returning his eyes to the sheets of paper, Thornton smiled to himself. 'They are stories. Written by my grandmother.'

'Why the 'eck do you have them? And here, of all places?' Gaskell pondered aloud with palpable puzzlement, wondering why the soldier was not reading the things others seemed to, such as letters from their mothers or sweethearts, newspaper clippings from months ago that they had only just managed to lay their hands on, or even slyly devouring books or cards depicting scantily clad totties.

Thornton took a deep breath and breathed noisily through his nostrils as he thought. 'Because it is something to remember them by, my family, that is,' he said plainly.

'Are you married, sir?' Gaskell presumed to enquire. Looking the man up and down, something that took a while given his immense height, he guessed that his superior must be at least thirty, if not a year or two shy of either side, so it would not be a stretch to assume he had a wife and weans back in England. Furthermore, he was handsome. Nodding, Gaskell judged that the decorated Major-General was an ideal specimen for manhood with his dark hair and tanned skin, his whole physique and profile being impressively angular, boasting arms and a chest that were toughened by sheer muscle, so it would not be surprising if all the girls swooned over him.

'No, no, I am not,' came a fast reply. 'I have not yet found my Margaret.'

The boy scrunched up his face in confusion. 'Your Margaret?'

Thornton grinned. 'Aye, it is just a saying we men in the family have, 'tis all, so never you mind.'

'Where do you come from, then?' his companion wanted to know. 'I am from Manchester.'

'And I from not far afield. I hail from Milton, just a little further north.'

Gaskell blinked and then gasped. 'No!' he cried. 'You aren't…you aren't one of those Thorntons, are you? The ones who own Marlborough Mills? The cotton factory that supplies the British army with all the cloth for their clothes, sacks and sleeping bags?'

The man grinned proudly. 'The very same.'

'Boy-oh-boy!' sounded a strident whistle that echoed like the screech of a thousand trapped birds. 'There is no denying you are famous! But what brings you here, to the front? Shouldn't you be safe at home making cotton?' Grumbling, he knew where he would rather be.

'No, I have brothers enough for that, and my aunts and uncles,' Thornton explained. 'I, on the other hand, have always been a keen shot and rider, so it made sense for me to be sent here, for my sins,' he muttered bitterly, thinking about how he wished he could be back home in Milton, at the mill, his favourite place in all the world.

Sensing his distress, Gaskell thought once more about the paper held firmly in the Major-General's hands. 'Is that why you have the stories?' he speculated.

'Yes,' was all his superior planned to say, but for some reason, he found that he could not stop. 'I miss them, you see, my family, so this makes me feel closer to them.'

'Will you tell me about them?' Gaskell solicited, and Thornton was surprised by this strange request that probably came from nothing more than a desire to pass the time and take the lad's mind off things, and while part of him wished to bark back a refusal, telling him to mind his own business, he felt a desperate need to speak what was on his heart.

'My grandmother, she wrote these,' he said, holding up the heap of unspoiled papers. 'She decided to write an account of her life, of all our lives, all jotted down as tales that we could go back to. Not just us, but our children, and our children's children, and their children. The idea was prompted by your own great-grandmother, actually, who advocated the joys and liberations that writing could bring a woman. But my grandmother did not seek fame or fortune, all she wanted was a way for us to know who she was. It was a chance for us to forever be able to hear her voice and understand how much she cared for us all, how proud she was of each and every one of us, and how much she loved the life that she had chosen with the man she married, the man she gave her hand and heart to, as she used to say. She was very brave, my grandmother, and I draw on her strength myself to this day.'

'Brave, how so?'

Thornton sighed pensively. 'She experienced a lot in her young life, I suppose. She was obliged to leave her home and go live somewhere that she must have hated, to begin with, at least. It was so different. She always said how there were no flowers, and that made her sad at first,' he reminisced, thinking about how every time he saw a flower now in this barren land, he wished it well for her sake.

'I remember how she said that shaking a man's hand had been scandalous to her initially, what with being southern born and bred, and how when a certain mill master offered his to her for the first time, she flinched in fright at his audacity. We wouldn't think twice about such things now, but they did then. Still, many years later, she was known to shake any man's hand freely, and with as much warmth as the next person, a true Milton woman and master's wife, they'd call her,' he chuckled.

'And there she met my grandfather. He was like nobody she had ever known, all hard and harsh on the outside, but gentle and shy on the inside. Ha, she used to call him her boiled egg,' Thornton joked fondly, thinking back to the days when he had joined them at the breakfast table. 'And even although he had no money or house to his name, no prospects, she wanted him, just him, nobody and nothing else would do as far as she was concerned. She was an heiress, you see, with choices, and she could have had just about any man who took her fancy. Her London family warned her against him, but she was as stubborn as they came, and so she married him and proudly took on his name and shared in his life, never once regretting her choice.'

Beaming at the retelling of this romance, Gaskell decided that he liked the sound of this person who seemed more like a lioness than a lady with the way she fought for what she wanted and defended what she loved. 'What was she like, as your grandmother, I mean?'

'She was a good woman, the best that ever lived. While I miss her sorely, I am glad she did not live to see this,' he lamented, his eyes watering as he gazed at the wretched world that lay outside the door. While others believed that it was cowardly for a man to cry, he did not think so. He thought that it was honest, that it was pure, and that it cleansed the soul of everything evil and corrupting if left unbled. 'It would have broken her heart to know of the heartache that I have witnessed, so I am glad that she is with us no more, no matter how much I wish I could see her, just once more.'

Gaskell nodded. 'Did you see a lot of her? I never see my grandparents, they live in India,' he said regretfully.

'Yes, I did, thankfully. The Thorntons were a close family, they still are, so my father saw his parents often. I used to spend time with her when I was a child. She used to sit at her desk and write her stories, a posy of fresh yellow roses always in a vase with a note that read: 'I found them in the hedgerow, you have to look hard,'' he recalled nostalgically.

'I would totter through and clamber onto her knee and play with my trains. I remember that she would gently take my two carriages and have them pass one another, but then they would stop for a rest, and two people would get out from each train, a man and a woman, and kiss, and then they would go back onto one train, and that would pull away, heading north. I never understood why she did that. I would protest and complain that the lady had to get back on her own train, but my grandmother would merely smile and say no-no, she had to go with the man. I would ask why, but all she would ever tell me, with a peck to my cheek, was: 'Or else there would be no you.''

'And your grandfather, what of him? What was his name?' an enthralled Gaskell wanted to know.

Thornton felt the strings of his heart tug in memory of that dear man. 'John,' was his sentimental reply, an affectionate gleam in his cobalt eye. 'His name was John. John Thornton. Just like me. Or rather, I am just like him,' he explained, his hand rising to scratch his long beak of a nose. 'And she was Margaret, his Margaret, he her faithful John.'

'When I was born, I was long with my lanky body and legs, and I had a mop of hair as black as coal and as thick as the snow that lay outside and coated the cobbles of the mill yard. My father, Frederick, laughed out loud when I came out, and declared that I was just like his old man, and so I was named John for his sake.'

'And what was he like?' Gaskell pestered further still, eating an apple that was surprisingly fresh.

Thornton's face, muddied and tired as it was, radiated with the glow of fond memories. 'He was the other half of my grandmother's soul,' he answered simply. 'They were so different and yet so similar. She was friendly, serene, and full of grace, constantly insisting upon seeing the best in people, whereas, he was reserved, prone to being out of temper, and perpetually finding fault with others. He would work himself up into a fractious rage, but she would soon pacify him in an instant. All she had to do was place a hand on his shoulder, and without saying a word, my grandfather would be like a storm calm. He would forever say that she was his saving grace, his angel sent to rescue him, and without her, he would be lost and alone. She was his hope and his happiness, you see, his salvation.'

Gaskell swallowed a slice of his apple, welcoming the taste and texture of the moistened fruit as it slid down his throat. 'Was he fearsome?'

Chuckling, Thornton shook his head in steadfast dissent. 'No. He would like to think he was, the old bulldog, but he was more bark than bite. I used to think he was like a big bear, but in truth, he was just like the teddy bear my niece takes to her bed at night, all rough on the outside, but soft on the inside, there to bring us all comfort when we were sad or scared. While he could be cross, and while he was imposing and impressive as a man and a master, he was the very best grandfather a boy could hope for. He was kind. He was patient. He was intelligent. And he never once raised his voice or hand to me. Whenever I was crying, he would come, as if from nowhere, and bundle me up in his arms. There was nowhere safer in all the world than his arms, so it was never a surprise to me that my grandmother was usually to be found sheltered there in his tender embrace, the two of them standing close and swaying in a slow dance, almost like giddy newly-weds who had just discovered their passionate love, even when they were old.'

'I remember that grandfather used to read every evening,' he said, his eyes flitting to the inside of his kit bag to spy something hidden away there, a family book that had been bequeathed to him by his namesake, and one he could not bear to part with. Letting his fingers slip inside and stroke the cover dotingly, Thornton continued: 'Plato was his favourite, an old volume that was well-worn, his most prized possession, and my grandmother would sit by his side, and the two of them would read it together, always holding hands, whispering secretively like children about Northampton, riots, misunderstandings, and dresses of icy blue and green. We would ask them what they were talking of, but they just smirked, winked at each other, and then shared a kiss or two.'

By now, Gaskell had given up all care about his apple and his fears as he listened to Thornton with bated breath. 'When did they die?' he ventured, unsure of whether this was a question too far, but fortunately, the narrator did not seem to mind.

'They died at the same time, on the same day, just as we always knew they would. It was ten years ago today, in fact,' he mused, amazed that he had forgotten until now. 'They went to bed one night, and we found them the next morning, holding each other close as if they were young lovers, their arms wrapped around each other, her head on his chest, his fingers in her hair and around her waist, great big smiles on their peaceful faces. They departed this life as they would have wanted, together, and it could not have been any other way.'

Gaskell could feel tears welling in the corner of his eye. 'How?'

Thornton frowned. Was it not obvious? 'Because, as I said, they were two halves of the same person. John Thornton had been made and moulded so that he might be the husband of Margaret Hale, and Margaret Hale had been crafted and created so that she might be the wife of John Thornton. They did everything together, shared everything, and endured everything as a devoted couple. Their souls were twins. Their minds connected. Their hearts beat in time as one. They were the same being, in essence, as if God had used the same ball of wool to knit them in their mother's wombs. We always knew that one could not exist without the other, so when one went, the other gladly went too.'

By now, the tears were well and truly rolling down the boy's face. 'It sounds like they were very happy.'

'They were, they truly were,' Thornton settled, his own blue eyes wet with the memory of unadulterated contentment. His grandparents had always said that they were each other's whole lives, that their children were their world entire, and their grandchildren were their pride and joy, and John, this John, had felt that every day that they had lived, the two of them loyally showing him how loved he was through their gentle and generous thoughts and deeds.

Gaskell understood, he understood completely. 'And that is why you read the stories? It is something to remember them by.'

'And so I can go home again,' Thornton replied honestly, praying that he one day would.

Just then, there was a loud noise outside, and the sky lit up with the colours of bursting flares that dissolved across the inky-blue backdrop of the night. There were loud cries that punctuated the previously eerie silence of stalemate, the roars of machines a furious call to arms, announcing that the enemy was awake, alive and ready to attack.

Thornton stared at the scene for a few seconds as his mind absorbed what this meant and what may come. 'Yes,' said he, clutching his grandmother's stories, her Thornton Tales, close to his heart, her timeless love seeping from the pages and into his soul, 'because even if I can never go home again, at least I can go home.'

The End