When the war was over, Johnathan read about the Battle of Monte Cassino and marvelled that he was still alive to do so. Fifty thousand men dead; how war diminished the meaning of those numbers.
His greatest fear was of becoming brutalised; and he knew, of course, that to a degree he had been. No one could fight as he had done, see the things he had seen, and emerge unscathed. He knew he was desensitised to a degree, less susceptible, far from the gentle young man he had been. But he had clung to a determination not to be entirely hardened as if to a religion, to believe in the rightness of the cause he was fighting for, and to see that as the justification for all that he had been asked to do. He had to remain true to himself. But it was never easy, and often seemed impossible.
He would never forget, and was glad that he would not, the morning after the bombing of the abbey, crowning as it did the lovely town of Monte Cassino, all reduced to a stark dead rubble. Only about forty people remained in the town: six monks, sheltering in the vaults of the abbey, a handful of tenant farmers, orphaned and abandoned children, and some badly wounded and dying. The old abbot led them down the path, reciting his rosary as they came; Johnathan found it impossible not to weep. That it was a great victory – for the abbey was not an isolated fortress, but part of the great Gustav Line stretching from the mountains to the sea – seemed at that moment irrelevant.
He had arrived in Italy towards the end of 1943 having been heavily involved in the fighting in North Africa; but he had got the sand out of his shoes, as he put it, and had been part of the successful invasion of Sicily. One of his happier memories had been the landing in the Bay of Salerno near Naples. The villagers had treated them with sheer joy, cheering when they saw the Allied flag. It was Christmas time; he ate tinned turkey, and tried not to think about Christmases past at Guildford Park, the vast tree in the hall, the Christmas dinner table laden with goodies – obscenely now, it seemed to him – midnight service in the village church, Boxing Day shoots. Some of his fellow officers, and indeed his men, took comfort from their happy memories; Johnathan found them tantalising and hurtful. He tried and entirely failed to even find any kind of reality in Diana and her place in his past or his future. That frightened him more than anything.
But there were good things: and one of them was the incredible mishmash of nationalities who formed the Allied troops. Americans, Indians, New Zealanders, Canadians, French and the Gurkhas. Archetypal Englishman that he was, inclined to be awkward when confronted by any foreigner, he found an entirely new form of easy camaraderie: epitomised just before the worst of the fighting began, by a football match, followed by tea parties, a concert, a great deal of wine and a film at the camp cinema. He could never remember afterwards what the film was – some kind of absurd comedy – but the whole day somehow stood out for them all, a beacon of cheerful common sense, shining against the insanity of war.
The run-up to the fighting was incredibly difficult; they could do nothing by day without drawing enemy fire, so resupplying was all done at night; there was a problem with the water and few of the wells contained anything fit to drink, which didn’t help.
They were relieved at one point at night by a troop of men from the Royal Fusiliers who moved in silently, boots wrapped in sandbags, the only sound the croaking of frogs. In the marshes. Incredibly, Johnathan found himself at breakfast staring at one of his greatest friends from Eton, found himself greeted with a clap on the back and, ‘Good Lord, Gunners, nice to see you. How are you, old chap?’ It was almost in the Dr Livingstone league of British understatement.
The bloody, savage fighting finished in victory on 18 May when the long battle was over; exhausted, they learned of the fall of Rome on 4 June.
Now what? he thought.
One thing was settling into firm resolution in his mind: he could not return, if he ever got home, to his rather pointless job in the City. He wanted, indeed needed, to go home to Guildford Park, to work on the farm and the estate, to build a more satisfactory future for himself than one based on the rise in value of the stock exchange, a growing client list, and an annual increase in salary. How Diana would fit into that future, he could not begin to imagine. Or even think about.
‘Just listen to this.’ Laura looked up from the Daily Mirror. ‘Fortnum and Mason are stocking grapes, peaches – at seven and six each, I might say – and chocolates! Oh, it’s disgusting. And did you know, the Dorchester is packed every night with its own extra-deep shelter, lest the poor toffs get caught out by an air raid. How can this still be happening? When ordinary people are homeless and often hungry. Oh, it makes me so angry. How can it be allowed?’
Tom said rather feebly he didn’t know; in truth, at that moment neither did he care. He was too depressed.
Both of them had finally been released from hospital, Tom invalided out of the army, Laura returning to school part-time until the spring term. They were both living at her little flat, while he tried to come to terms with his new, empty situation and what he might do: even with the small diamond on her finger, this could never have happened before the war, a young couple, unmarried, living under the same roof. Tom’s parents were shocked and Laura’s headmaster was very vocal on the subject.
‘It’s a bad example for the children, and the parents won’t like it. If the wedding isn’t very soon, Laura, I shall have to consider my position.’
Laura knew that his wasn’t a strong position, as half the staff had been called up, and she was an excellent deputy headmistress; but just the same it all added to Tom’s general unhappiness and sense of uselessness. He sat about a great deal, feeling wretched.
Laura, working extremely hard, finally ran out of sympathy, ordering him one afternoon to go and see Mr Pemberton. ‘He’d be pleased anyway and you never know, he might want you back . . .’
‘Even if he did, I can’t keep a wife on what he pays me, and—’
‘Oh, Tom,’ said Laura, and her face took on the expression that he knew there was no arguing with. ‘Your wife, as you call her, is working, and earning a decent wage, and we can perfectly manage between us, so I don’t see the point of not going. In fact, I want you to go and if you don’t, I shall be quite annoyed, and you know you don’t like that.’
Tom didn’t, and so it was that he went to see Mr Pemberton that very afternoon.
Laura walked into the flat to find the table laid, a delicious smell of cooking in the air, and even a bottle of cider chilling in cold water in the sink.
And Tom actually smiling.
‘So – what’s this about then?’ she said, and he told her. Mr Pemberton had indeed been pleased to see him; but Betty had told him the dreadful news before he went in: that Nigel had been killed two years earlier, in action in Italy.