Muddy Boots and Silk Stockings by Julia Stoneham Page A

he and the small group from within a larger group with whom he had done his training regarded themselves as a band of brothers. They would survive because they willed it so. They were indestructible. But as the months passed and their numbers were reduced, in many cases by death, in others by horrific injury, the comradery faltered and changed. Mess banter became increasingly brittle. Relationships with wives and lovers suffered and new conquests tended to be considered only on the briefest andmost shallow terms. The girls too, the FANYs, Wrens and WAAFS, found the going tough and hardened themselves in self-defence against the daily news of lost men. Men downed over enemy territory. Men ditching in the freezing Channel. Men with their skin burnt off them and their limbs shredded by shrapnel. Excesses increasingly became Christopher’s only escape from the cruel events that confronted him on a daily basis. Drinking, risk-taking and love-making became frenetic fixes, short-time diversions, while the fact of his own mortality, something with which the young should not have to deal, faced him each day.
    Christopher had no way of knowing how close to the edge he was and so he continued, taking his orders, carrying them out, coming home for spells of leave and returning to base when the leaves were over. Although he knew that he was misreading people and had lost the art of communication, mostly he behaved well, responding much as he would when returning a lob in a game of tennis or driving a cricket ball into the outfield. It was when he was faced with a situation which involved feelings beyond the superficial that he floundered into the sort of stupidity that had ruined his chances with Georgina. Yet when he asked himself ‘chances of what?’ he had no answer. Perhaps, on his next leave, he would try again, approaching her differently. But how? He concentrated on assembling her face in his mind and finally fell briefly asleep in an appreciative contemplation of her steady grey eyes, only to wake with astart. Downstairs the clock began to strike. If it was five he would get up. If it was four he would try to sleep again. If it was seven he was already late. It was three. He lay for some time unable to control his imagination which, as soon as he relaxed his grip on it, had him plummeting out of the sky in a burning Hurricane. He swung out of his bed. On the upstairs landing he opened the heavy curtains. There was a glimmer of light from the last quarter of the moon. Enough for him to see his way down the stairs. His father, before retiring, had opened the curtains in the first-floor drawing room. Christopher made his way to the drinks table, poured himself a finger or two of whiskey and stood drinking.
    Roger Bayliss may have been woken by a creaking stair board. The slightly larger than usual amount of alcohol he had taken that evening had made him thirsty and his bedside carafe was empty. He would go downstairs and refill it from the kitchen tap where the water was best. At the same time he would check up on the sound he thought he had heard. Probably a window left unfastened. Or one of the farm cats raiding the pantry. The wind was rising and a scud of cloud brought the first rattle of rain against a west-facing window. It also drowned the faint sound of Roger’s slippers on the stairs so that when he saw the outline of his son, standing beside the drinks table, and spoke to him, Christopher spun round defensively.
    ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’ his father asked, adding uncharacteristically, ‘Bit uptight about tomorrow, perhaps?’Christopher laughed. He had been trying to refill his glass and now, for some reason, could not seem to do so without the lip of the decanter repeatedly striking the rim of the glass so violently that it seemed likely to shatter it. Roger removed the two objects from his son’s hands, replenished Christopher’s drink and poured one for himself.
    ‘You are all right, aren’t you?’ Roger said