Free The Somme Stations by Andrew Martin Page A

The first thing that told you they knew their way around a shovel was that they called it a blade.
    ‘Tha needs ter clean t’blade,’ Roy said to Andy.
    ‘Aye?’ said Andy, taking the role of the apprentice, and giggling back at Roy, ‘Wha’ever fower?’
    Roy then touched Andy on the shoulder, and half whispered, ‘Ask me ’ow.’
    ‘’Ow,’ said Andy. ‘ Ow do I clean it?’
    Roy produced a wooden wedge from his tunic pocket, holding it up like a magician, which set them both laughing fit to bust. Oamer was looking at me and shaking his head, and Oliver Butler, who’d seen him do it, was scowling at both of us. But the twins were better at teaching digging than the army instructors. The main thing was to pat down the sides of the hole as you dug. Roy and Andy made a big thing of this, and turned it into a singing jig, which they performed while slapping with their shovels the sides of the trench. As far as I could make sense of the words, they ran along these lines:
    ‘Batter ’em, flatten ’em,
    Flatter ’em, splatter ’em,
    Don’t leave yer ’ole
    ’Til yer stuff’s packed flatter ’n that ’n’ mum.’
    (Because as well as calling shovels ‘blades’, they called earth ‘stuff’.)
    The pressing question, it seemed to me, was: Are this pair actually dangerous? From the look on the face of William Harvey, he thought so, and I knew he’d spoken to Oamer about sleeping away from them in the barn.
    Apart from digging, we were told off in pairs for sentry-go. A control point was made on the road leading onto Spurn consisting of three oil drums, two planks of wood and a charcoal brazier. Barbed wire was laid in the fields to either side. In this and the digging, we alternated with the other section from the battalion: we were Shift A, they were Shift B. Most of the traffic that came by was to help with the building of the railway along Spurn, construction of which had started from the opposite end – from the tip, Spurn Point.
    The password was ‘Skeleton’.
    One morning, when I was doubled-up with Scholes, we were approached by a party of schoolkids from the villages of Kilnsea and its neighbour, Easington.
    ‘Password,’ said Scholes.
    They didn’t know it.
    ‘Look here,’ I said to the kid in the lead, ‘ is there a school on Spurn?’ (For we’d been told nothing about it.)
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t be going there.’
    I looked at Scholes, and he was standing with his eyes closed, as if he could transport himself elsewhere by so-doing. Scholes shouldn’t have been a policeman, and he certainly wasn’t cut out for a soldier. He was plum scared of going to France, I knew. He spent most of his guard turns staring out to the high ships and playing mournful tunes on the penny whistle that he’d brought with him in lieu of his flute. I let the kids through – if they were German spies, I would take the knock.
    In fact, there was a school on Spurn, as we discovered when the master came along five minutes after. When that bloke had gone through, Scholes looked at the perfectly clear blue sky and said, ‘A storm’s due.’ He’d heard this from one of theB Shift men, who’d had it from the farmer they lodged with. Scholes then asked me what I made of Oliver Butler.
    ‘Mmm … Tricky customer,’ I said.
    ‘Fascinated by you, he is. Always plugging me for particulars. What were you like in the police office? Were you up to the mark as a plain clothes man?’
    ‘Snoopy bugger,’ I said.
    ‘And Dawson,’ said Scholes, ‘what about him?’
    I said I considered him a thoroughly white bloke.
    Scholes said, ‘It’s a bit weird being at close quarters with him. In York, I pulled him in twice.’
    I asked ‘What for?’ but I already knew.
    ‘Drunk and Incapable.’
    ‘On the station?’
    ‘Aye.’
    ‘Has he ever mentioned it?’
    ‘It’s never come up, no. It’s as if he’s blotted it out of his memory.’
    ‘Did he go away?’ I asked, because you might