Chapter One
SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 1944
Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.
Edward Thomas, “As the Team’s Head-Brass”
In the months afterwards all of the women, at some point, said they’d known the
men were leaving the valley. Just as William Jones used to forecast the weather
by studying the sky or the formations of migrating birds, so the women said
they’d been able to forecast the men’s sudden departure. After all, they were
their men, their husbands. No one could read them like they could. So no
surprise if they should see what was coming. That’s what the women said in the
long silence afterwards.
But in truth none of them saw any change in the men’s behaviour. None of them
knew the men were leaving and in many ways this was the hardest part of what
happened. Their husbands left in the night. Just days after news of the invasion
came crackling through on Maggie’s wireless, propped on a Bible on her kitchen
table, the men, lit by a hunter’s moon, met at William’s milking shed and
slipped out of the valley. Moving in single file they walked through the higher
fields and up over the Hatterall ridge; an ellipsis of seven dark shapes
decreasing over the hill’s shoulder, shortening to a last full stop and then
nothing, just the blank page of the empty slope. The women, meanwhile, slept
soundly in their beds. It was only in the morning when a weak September sun
shone into the valley that they realised what had happened.
* * *
For Sarah Lewis it began in her sleep. The drag, rattle, and bark of the dogs
straining on their chains was so persistent it entered her dreams. A ship in
storm, the sailors shouting for help from the deck, their pink faces and open
mouths obscured by the spray blown up the sides of the hull. Then the noise
became Marley’s ghost, dragging his shackles over a flagstone floor. Clink,
slump, clink, slump. Eventually, as the light brightened about the edges of the
blackout curtain and Sarah surfaced through the layers of her sleep, the sound
became what it was. Two dogs, urgent and distressed, pulling again and again on
their rusty chains and barking, short and sharp through the constraint of their
collars.
Without opening her eyes Sarah slid her hand across the sheet behind her,
feeling for the warm impression of her husband’s body. The old horsehair
mattress they slept on could hold the shape of a man all day and although Tom
was usually up before her, she found comfort in touching the warm indentation of
where he’d lain beside her. She stroked her palm over the thin cotton sheet. A
few hairs poking through the mattress caught against her skin, hard and stubborn
as the bristles on a sow’s back.
And there he was. A long valley where his weight had pressed the ball of his
shoulder and his upper arm into the bed; a rise where his neck had lain beneath
the pillow. She explored further down. A deeper bowl again, sunk by a protruding
hip and then the shallower depression of his legs tapering towards the foot of
the bed. As usual, Tom’s shape, the landscape of him, was there. But it was
cold. Normally Sarah could still feel the last traces of his body’s heat, held
in the fabric of the sheet just as the mattress held his form. But this morning
that residue was missing.
With fragments of her dreams still fading under her lids, she slid her hand
around the curves and indentations again, and then beyond them, outside the
borders of his body. But the sheet was cold there too. The dogs below her window
barked and barked, their sound making pictures in her mind’s eye: their sharp
noses tugging up with each short yap, exposing the white triangles of their
necks, flashing on and off like a warning. She lay there listening to them,
their chains rising and falling on the cobblestones of the yard.
Tom must have been up early. Very early. Not in the morning at all but in the
night. She turned on her side and shifted herself across the bed. The blankets
blinked with her movement and she felt a stab of cold air at her shoulder.
Pulling them tight about her neck, she lay there within the impression of her
husband, trying not to disturb the contours of his map. Everything about her
felt heavy, as if her veins were laced with lead. She was trying to think where
Tom could be but the barks of the dogs were distracting her. Her mind was
blurred, as buckled as a summer’s view through a heat haze. Why hadn’t he taken
the dogs? He always took the dogs. Did he say something last night? She couldn’t
remember. She couldn’t remember anything past their dinner. She opened her eyes.
In front of her the bedroom window was bright about the ill-fitting blackout
cloth, a thin square outline of light burning into the darkened room. She
blinked at it, confused. The window looked into the western flank of the valley,
and yet there was light. Too much light. The sun must already be over the Black
Hill on the other side of the house. She must have slept late. She never slept
this late.
She rose quickly, hoping movement would dispel her mild unease. Tugging roughly
on the heavy blankets, she made the bed, tucking their edges under the mattress.
Then she plumped the pillows, shaking them as if to wake them. Brushing a few of
Tom’s hairs from the one beside hers she paused for a second and stilled
herself, as if the hairs might summon Tom himself. She listened, one hand still
resting on the pillow. But there was nothing. Just the usual ticks and groans of
the old building waking and warming, and outside, the dogs, barking and barking.
She pulled back the blackout cloth and opened the thin curtains behind it with
both hands, unveiling the room to light. It was a bright, clear day. She closed
her eyes against the glare. When she opened them again white spots shimmered
over her vision. Drawing the sleeve of her nightdress over her wrist she wiped
away the veneer of condensation from one of the small panes and looked down into
the yard below. The dogs, both border collies, both bitches, sensed the movement
above them and barked and strained harder in response, pulling their chains taut
behind them. Sarah looked above the outhouse where they were tied. Over the top
of its jigsaw slate roof she could see the lower paddock rising up to meet the
sweep and close of the valley’s end wall. Except for a few grazing sheep it was
empty, and so were the steep-sided hills on either side, their edges bald
against the blue sky.
Turning away from the window, she pulled her nightdress over her head. Again she
felt the cold air on her skin. The dress’s neckline held her hair for a moment,
then let it go all at once so it fell heavily about her shoulders. She sat on
the edge of the bed, put on her knickers, a vest, and began balling a pair of
woollen stockings over her hand, her forehead puckered in a frown. Catching
herself in the dressing-table mirror she paused and ran a finger up the bridge
of her nose between her eyebrows. A slight crease was forming there. She’d only
noticed it recently; a short line that remained even when her brow was relaxed.
Still sitting on the edge of the bed she gathered up her hair and, turning her
profile to the mirror, held it behind her head with one hand, exposing her neck.
That crease was the only mark on her face. Other than that her skin was still
smooth. She turned the other way with both hands behind her head now. She should
like a wedding to go to. Or a dance, a proper dance where she could wear a dress
and her hair up like this. That dress Tom bought for her on their first
anniversary. She couldn’t have worn it more than twice since. Tom. Where was he?
She dropped her hair and pulled on her stockings. Reaching into the
dressing-table drawer, she put on a blouse and began doing up the buttons, the
crease on her forehead deepening again.
Bad news had been filtering into the valley every day for the last few weeks.
First the failed landings in Normandy. Then the German counterattack. The pages
of the newspapers were dark with the print of the casualty lists. London was
swollen with people fleeing north from the coast. They had no phone lines this
far up, and apart from Maggie’s farm, which sat higher in the valley, the whole
area was dead for radio reception. But news of the war still found its way to
them. The papers, often a couple of days old, the farrier when he came, Reverend
Davies on his fortnightly visits to The Court, all of them brought a trickle of
stories from the changing world beyond the valley. Everyone was unnerved but
Sarah knew these stories had unsettled Tom more than most. He rarely spoke of
it, but for him they threw a shadow in the shape of his brother, David. David
was three years younger than Tom. He’d had no farm of his own so he’d been
conscripted to fight. Two months ago he was declared missing in action and,
while Tom maintained an iron resolve that his brother would appear again, the
sudden shift in events had shaken his optimism.
For Sarah news of the war still seemed to have an unreal quality, even when a
few days ago the names of the battlegrounds changed from French villages to
English ones. There were marks of the conflict all about her: the patchwork of
ploughed fields down by the river once kept for grazing; the boys from her
schooldays, and the farmhands, many of them gone for years now. But unlike Tom
she didn’t have a relative in the fighting. Her own older brothers had been
absent from her life ever since they’d argued with her father and broken from
the family home when she was still a girl. They’d bought a farm together outside
Brecon, large enough to have saved them both from the army. So Sarah didn’t
possess that vital thread connecting her to the war that brought the news
stories so vividly to life for so many others. There were women here, in the
valley, who had lost sons, and in the early years she’d seen other mourning
mothers and wives in Longtown and Llanvoy. But even these women, with their
swollen eyes and dark dresses, seemed to have passed into a different place, a
parallel world of grief. The sight of them evoked sympathy in Sarah, sometimes a
flush of silent gratitude that Tom was in a reserved occupation, but never
empathy.
Only once in the last five years had the war really impacted upon her. When the
bomber crashed up on the bluff. Then, suddenly, it had become physical. She’d
been woken by the whine of its dive followed by the terrible land-locked thunder
of its explosion. Tom held her afterwards, speaking softly into her hair, “Shh,
bach, shh now.” In the morning they’d all gone up to look. Tom and she took the
ponies. When they got there the Home Guard and the police from Hereford had
already put a cordon around the wreckage so they just stood at a distance and
watched, the thin rope singing and whipping in the hilltop wind. Beyond the
crashed plane she’d glimpsed a tarpaulin laid over a shallow hump. “One of the
crew,” Tom had said with a jerk of his chin. She’d agreed with him. “Yes, must
be,” although she’d thought the hump looked too small, too short, to be the body
of a man. The ponies shifted uneasily under them, pawing the ground, tossing
their heads. They were disturbed by this sculpture of twisted metal that had
appeared on their hill, by this charred and complicated limb half embedded in
the soil as if it had erupted from the earth, not fallen from the sky. And so
was Sarah. She’d heard about the Blitz, and about Liverpool and Coventry, its
cathedral burning through the night. She’d even seen their own bombers out on
training runs. But she’d never seen an enemy plane before. Usually they were
just a distant drone to her, a long revolving hum above the clouds as they
returned from a raid on Swansea or banked for home after emptying their payloads
over Birmingham. But now, here was one of them, on the hill above her farm.
Massive and perfunctory. So ordinary in its blunt engineering. And under that
tarpaulin was a real German. A man from over there who had flown over here to
kill them.
She dressed quickly in a long skirt and cardigan and went downstairs to pull on
her boots in the porch by the kitchen door. As she bent to lace them, she
noticed Tom’s weren’t there. Not just his work boots but his summer ones too;
both pairs were missing. She stared for a moment at the space where they’d been,
four vague outlines in a scattering of dust blown in under the door. Leaning
forward on her knee, she touched one of these empty footprints as if it could
tell her where he’d gone. But there was nothing, just the cold stone against her
fingertips. She shook her head. What was she doing? She stood up, took her coat
from the hook on the back of the door, pushed her arms through its sleeves, and
drew its belt tight about her waist. Lifting the door’s latch she stepped out
into the brightness of the cobbled yard where the day fell in on her with a cool
wash of air. She breathed in deeply, feeling the first metallic tang of autumn
at the back of her throat. Shards of sunlight reflected off the stones. The dogs
barked faster and louder to greet her. She moved towards them and they settled
back on their haunches, stepping the ground with their forepaws, quivering with
anticipation as if a voltage ran under their skins.
* * *
The dogs, let loose of their chains, wove and slipped about her as she walked up
the slope across the lower paddock and through the coppiced wood behind the
farm. The extra hours of restraint had charged them with a frantic energy and
they raced ahead of her, ears flat, before doubling back, their sorrowful eyes
looking up at hers, their heads low and their coats slickly black in the dappled
sunlight. Sarah, in contrast, felt her legs heavy and awkward beneath her. She
took the slope with more pace, pressing the heels of her palms into her thighs
with each step. Twice she found herself stopping to rest against the trunk of a
tree. She was twenty-six years old, worked every day and was usually through
this wood before she knew it, but this morning it was as if one of the dogs’
chains had snagged around her feet and was dragging her back down the hill with
every step she took.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Resistance
by Owen Sheers
Copyright © 2008 by Owen Sheers.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Nan A. Talese
Copyright © 2008
Owen Sheers
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-385-52210-6
