[1]Our house in London was at about the middle of a long, very wide road lined with (then) young plane trees. The top of the road near the Common was the "better" end, going down past our house and other houses like it and then more steeply downhill to a stretch not built on, a vague area of slightly messed-up open spaces, a Board school with its shrieking playground, and the cemetery.
[...]
Down this road on winter afternoons came the military funerals. No doubt they came on summer mornings too, like the ordinary funerals — they came all the time, several a day — but it is the winter afternoons that I remember. These were the funerals of the soldiers who had died of wounds in the military hospital up the road and round the corner.
[2]Going down the hill where I stood on a chair by the window watching, they went at a measured pace, the hooves of the horses — ordinary brown horses not black funeral ones — clopping soberly by. Behind the pairs of horses came the gun carriage with its coffin draped with the Union Jack. There were mounted soldiers, khaki-clad, useful-looking riders without ceremonial trappings.
Following the gun-carriage were >[52] usually some ordinary mourners, people as distinct from soldiers, in carriages drawn by undertakers' black horses.
The number of following carriages and the amount of flowers varied. Some flag-draped coffins had no mourners following. Why? The procession would go by, down the hill into the wintry afternoon with its faint foggy smell that gripped your throat if you were out in it. It was the smell of coal fires and winter. The sky, when the cortege had gone out of sight, would be smoky grey with red streaks over the low-lying ground beyond the cemetery.
[3]Those afternoons were very quiet. The road seemed scarcely used. I would wait. Then faintly the bugle would sound, final and sad, the lamenting never-coming-back notes of the Last Post. It seemed to me a dark, smoky, red slash of sound against the quiet grey of the London winter evening coming down.
Not long afterwards the soldiers and the horses were to be heard coming back at a smart trot, the coffin and the flag gone from the gun-carriage. The soldiers were hurrying home to their barracks for tea with plum-and-apple jam. My mother would come in with a loaf of bread and a stone jar of dripping. We would toast the bread at the fire, by the light of the fire. With luck the dripping would be used up to near the bottom of the jar, where [53] delicious beef-jelly could be reached. This would improve the toast enormously.
"What happens to all those dead people who are put into graves?" I asked my mother. "They rot," she replied, spreading dripping.
[4]Because of the funerals passing the house so regularly on the way to the cemetery, the idea of death had always been familiar to me. I liked the way my father raised his hat when a funeral passed by on the road. Older ladies bowed and I liked that, too. However, I did not feel equal to bowing as they did; at six years old my waist was somehow too near the ground. One day, when I was missing, my mother asked a passer-by if she had seen a little girl in a blue woolly hat. "Yes," the stranger replied, "she's standing at the corner up the road, raising the hat to funerals."
No doubt I had found it wiser to pay my respects to the dead out of sight of my mother.
[176] If there were bells and sirens I do not remember them. It was November 11th, 1918, Armistice Day. We children crowded on to the front steps of the school and knew that the fighting was over. There was an air of painful rejoicing. The little Belgian pupil teacher [who lodged with the Betts family], a refugee of about twenty, burst into tears and ran away along the road to the shops, and ran back again with a paper [177] bag full of Allied flags which she pinned on our coats, laughing and crying and hugging us. Perhaps it was her tears that made the celebration poignant and silenced in my memory the bells and sirens, as if a bloodied hush had fallen over Europe.
The walking wounded from the military hospital wore bright blue jackets and trousers of a hairy flannel that was not pressed or tailored like a uniform. It had a cosy look about it, more like a bed jacket. Their shirts were white and their ties were bright red. They were hatless. They humped about on crutches or on two sticks. They wore an arm in a sling or were minus a leg or bandaged round the head. Some showed no visible signs of injury.
On fine days they lurched and hirpled about the Common. Most of the benches would have two or three wounded soldiers in their hospital blue, resting, when the sun was shining. When they looked up as I scudded past them on my scooter they did not look sad. They smoked cigarettes and seemed contented enough. But these were the ones who were not going to die.
For many months after the war ended the military funerals from the hospital went on coming, though at longer intervals, down the road past our house. The soldiers, the limbers, the sound of hooves, the coffin draped in the flag, still passed. Still the Last [178] Post sounded for these stragglers. These were the soldiers who had died late of their wounds, for whom there had once been hope but it had faded. I was aware that these latecomers who came last to the Last Post had died slowly: just up the road from me. The living soldiers began to come back from the war. These were not the same as the ones who had gone away. They looked older and duller; their hair was not so bright.
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