Free Resistance by Owen Sheers Page A

Great War. She told Sarah that after the Somme she remembered sermons being preached down at Longtown discouraging a rash of desperate forays into the occult. It was the devil’s work, the minister had told them, knuckles white over the edge of the pulpit, this twisting of grief. But still, Maggie said, she’d known of young women all over, up all night using boards, cards, even psychics, trying to speak to the ghosts of their dead husbands, sons, and fathers.
    “What’s to say they won’t be back tonight? They’ve only been gone a few hours, haven’t they?”
    And now here they were, holding their own kind of séance for their own lost men; trying to conjure a reason for their leaving from the spaces they’d so suddenly left in their lives.
    “Well, Maggie?” Mary continued. “What makes you so sure? Did William say anything?”
    “No,” Maggie replied, shaking her head and sighing again. “No, he didn’t say anything.”
    There was something in Maggie’s tone, the slightest of inflexions over the way she’d said “say” that made the other women expectant. Mary stopped her questioning and all of them looked at Maggie, silently asking her to carry on. Maggie looked back at each of them in turn as if making a calculation, weighing their responses. Eventually, under the weight of their shared gaze, she stood and went over to the dresser once more. This time she pulled a pamphlet from the middle drawer.
    “But I did find this. Just now when I came back to milk the cows.”
    She dropped the pamphlet on the table in front of Mary. Sarah came over from the window and looked over Menna’s shoulder, her hands on the back of the chair. The pamphlet had a dull brown cover with the same typeface as the “Stand Fast” leaflet. The title, which they could just make out under smears of mud and a hole torn at its centre, curved around some illustrations of tools; a hoe, a plough, and a spade: “The Countryman’s Diary—1944.”
    “It was in the milking shed,” Maggie said. “On the floor. I only saw it because one of the heifers was standing on it.”
    Mary opened the cover and turned the first few pages. Maggie sat back down. She looked beaten, deflated. Whatever had been holding her firm from within had buckled and sagged.
    “Stupid bugger must have dropped it. What chance has he got if he can’t even keep hold of that?” she said, looking out the window.
    As Mary turned the pages Sarah caught glimpses of headings, diagrams, and snatches of text:
SILENT KILLING  … insert the knife an inch below the ear and twist …  DELAY MECHANISMS I. The Time Pencil .… The Time Pencil looks rather like a propelling pencil. One end is copper, the other brass.…  TARGETS I. Shell and Bomb Dumps .…  IV. Semi-Tracked Vehicles .… Fix a charge of 2lb Gelignite at any of the following points.…  I. The Pull Switch .… The pull switch is designed so that when a wire fitted to the eye at the end is pulled, a cap is fired.…  OB Maintenance  … ensure to keep all vents clear of debris.…  Escape Routes .… In the event of hostile intrusion …
    All of them were silent as Mary carried on turning the pages. It was not a thick pamphlet and she soon came to the last one, closing it to reveal the innocuous cover once more: “The Countryman’s Diary—1944.”
    Maggie spoke first. “That’s why I think they might not be back today. Or tomorrow.”
    “How …?” was all Menna could manage.
    Sarah sat down at the table again. “It isn’t possible. Tom never had the time.…”
    “I know, bach,” Maggie said. “I know. But there it is.” She looked at the other three women. Each of them looked as if they’d been slapped. The blood was shallow beneath their cheeks and they looked numb, lost in their thoughts, retracing days, nights, any scrap of time their husbands hadn’t been home or on the farm.
    “I thought he had a woman,” Mary said at last, looking straight ahead, her eyes unfocused.