Free The Lie by Helen Dunmore Page B

handwriting:
This is a very, very rum do indeed, isn’t it, BB? I wonder if it’s any rummer here than where you are. Rain pours through our huts like a river, and I am to referee the men’s boxing match on Sunday. Mrs Dennis ( he never spoke of his stepmother in any other way) writes that my room is to be repapered. She has chosen a nice light pattern which will do very well for nursery wallpaper. Her sister and family are coming to stay for several months, and Mrs Dennis thinks that my room will be best for the children. She knows that I will be quite comfortable in the Blue Room, since I shall be home so seldom. (Or at all, my dear BB? What do you think? How far shall I oblige her?) Mrs Dennis is having a most troublesome time over the nursery furniture. She supposes that she must blame this wretched war, which seems to have turned everything upside down. However, she is glad to know that I am doing my duty.
Felicia has knitted me a scarf which would wind around a baby’s finger at one end, and the whole of the regiment at the other. She says they knit comforts for soldiers at school, while Miss Tringham reads aloud from The Wide, Wide World. Thank God, Felicia has not yet attempted socks. Was ever a girl so unhandy as my sister? I have no gift for words, my dear BB, but I speak truth. Please notify degree of rumness your end.
    In the margin was a sketch of Frederick, flat on his back in the middle of the boxing ring while Mrs Dennis waved her paste-brush in triumph and a sergeant with ferocious moustaches counted him out.
    When we first got to Boxall, there were no places in the huts. There were too many of us. It was winter, and our tents filled with rain and blew down in the wind. We slept crammed together, moaning in our sleep, farting, easing our stinky, blistered feet out of our boots at the end of the day. There wasn’t any poetry here, except what was in my head. You were never alone and you were raw with being pulled out of everything you knew, and turned into something else.
    I was pig-ignorant. I didn’t know that at first, but camp soon taught me. Pig-ignorant, green as grass, a walking disaster in khaki. What I knew after the first week’s basic training was to keep my head down and my nose clean.
    Care of weapons soothed me. Stripping down, cleaning, oiling, reassembling. Sergeant Mills spoke to me about being on the Lewis guns, and about sniper detachments. He told me there were army schools in France now, where I could get specialist training. You could make something of yourself out there, boy . I thought about it that night, and the next day my aim wasn’t so good. It was too soon to get picked out, before I knew what that might mean, even though it meant extra pay. I’d wait. What I hadn’t reckoned with then was that the war was patient too. It had time for everyone. I learned that. I was fool enough to think that a human being could be cleverer than a war. You might keep your head down, or you might work your guts out to get a commission, but the war didn’t care either way. It had room for everyone.
    One of the last courses we did was wiring. There was a song in my head all that time:
    You can’t get over it
    You can’t get under it
    You can’t get above it
    You can’t get around it –
     
    That was wire. When you put in a post for wire, you don’t hammer it, you screw it in. I was too pig-ignorant even to know why. It was so you wouldn’t draw fire, banging away at the posts by night. We learned so many things, all of them given equal weight, and it wasn’t until later that we worked out which ones might keep us alive. I’d see faces go blank, because they couldn’t take in any more, and what they couldn’t take in might be the one thing that they needed to know. Such as not drawing on a lit Woodbine at night. You wouldn’t believe how far off that little red core is visible. Such as making gooseberries out of wire, and throwing them in to thicken the tangle.
    Felicia is