Free My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young

how it is just going on and on, and nobody mentions it, and if you don’t like it they think you’re mad, and you get shot, for cowardice, desertion . . . and your own men, your companions, your brothers, have to shoot you . . . and I’m so fucking scared out there every day, every night—
    and now they’ve made me a fucking officer—
    STOP IT.
    You’re a soldier, Riley, a good soldier and a decent bloke . For a bleak second he desperately wanted to go back to the front, where there was no time or space in a man’s mind to think about anything beyond good soldier, decent bloke. No – officer. It’s different. I will have responsibility.
    Yes, but no actual authority.
    They were proud he was an officer now. That was the kind of thing people at home wanted to hear.
    He didn’t want to think of Nadine as ‘people at home’. He wanted Nadine to know and share every single damn thing he ever knew or did on this earth, and to understand, and to share hers too . . . and he would rather get a shell tonight than have Nadine even hear of the possibility of the things he had known in this past year . . . and how do you get round that one?
    And you’re leaving her alone, remember? He hadn’t answered her letter in response to his Christmas card.
    Yes, but I . . .
    He looked out at the sea. Many nights he could hear the guns. On the seafront, some philanthropist had put up an iron sign on an iron leg, pointing out what was where across the sea: Calais, Dieppe, Dunkirk . . . Rome, Amsterdam, Moscow. He held his hand out in front of his face, like a divider. This side, to the right, ours. That side, to the left, theirs. Down the middle in the sump, us lot.
    Amsterdam, where she wanted to go, was on the other side. Van Eyck and Rembrandt and Franz Hals and . . . a furry peach, a silver-bloomed plum, striped roses and streaked tulips, vanilla and raspberry, arched stems and green beetles gleaming and one little worm-hole . . . bright sunflowers whirling . . . a branch of almond blossom.
    What a pompous, self-important, sententious, over-imaginative young man I was. What a thoughtless, useless, unkind . . . to leave without seeing Mum. To make all those decisions about what people were and what that meant – that Sir Alfred was a queer, and would not forgive me for staying out the night, that the Waveneys would never let me marry Nadine, that because Terence did a queer’s thing to me I had to . . . Well, I didn’t know, did I, what I was going into.
    So now, now that that world was so distant, and that attitude even more so, how could he pop back into it for tea and a chat? How could he write to that world, saying: ‘I hope this finds you in the pink as I am . . . It’s all pretty quiet here . . . Please send any kind of tobacco, and socks.’
    He went back to his room, went back to bed. Turned his pillow over.
    He slept all right, though. Dreams, obviously. Not very nice ones. But nothing compared to some of the lads.
    *
    Captain Locke had said, in that charming way of his, ‘If you pass through Sidcup on your way to town, pop in and see Mrs Locke, would you? It’s not far from the town. Tell her I’m all right? You won’t have time, of course, but . . .’
    Purefoy was reminded of how the posher someone was, the less they seemed to care about class – those educated, wealthy, dreaming men who don’t have a simple clue what is not possible when you are poor. He both loved and hated them for their genuine ignorance. How marvellous, how ridiculous, that it should be possible. He allowed himself to wonder what Mrs Captain Locke would think of him, Purefoy, turning up. The trenches were in some ways a leveller, to those who took it that way. But the advances Purefoy had craved were only cultural and matrimonial, wherein the Flanders mud had offered no progress, other than the odd burst from Captain Locke’s gramophone, and the occasional expression in Captain Locke’s amiable blue eye that showed he, too, knew of the