The Skeleton Man

From the church porch Dryden looked down on Jude’s Ferry. St Swithun’s stood on a hill thirty feet high, a peak in the billiard-table landscape of the Fens, the highest point on a low island of clay which had been inhabited for more than 1,000 years. He realized with a shock that he had stood on this precise point seventeen years earlier, the day of the evacuation, looking down on a village bustling with removal vans, army trucks, cars, livestock, the press, radio and TV cameras and a small but vocal band of children. Flags had flown from the army tents set up on the old recreation ground, and along the old Whittlesea Road the last of the sheep were herded, their bleating insistent and alarmed.

It had been an unforgettable assignment. Initially the army’s PR men had tried to keep all contact between the villagers and media to a mid-morning press conference in the Methodist Hall. The print media had agreed to stay away on the Sunday, the feast of St Swithun, to let the villagers enjoy the last saint’s day in privacy. But that Monday morning a bus had taken the press and TV crews from Ely in through the firing-range gates and straight to the Methodist Hall – packed with most of the surviving villagers. It had been a stilted affair dominated by one old soldier who’d clearly been encouraged to stand up and announce that he was proud the village was going to play its part in fighting for freedom. He’d got his medals on for the occasion so the TV boys had fêted him, happy they’d secured their picture story in time for the lunchtime news bulletins. A couple of women, both widows, said they would always remember what the village had done in two world wars – a statement which prompted another photocall at the war memorial at the top of The Dring, the little high street which ran beside an open ditch clogged with tall reeds.

Dryden had gone along to watch, and had noticed a man he presumed was the landlord of the New Ferry Inn, sitting on his doorstep drinking tea, watching with tired eyes, rimmed red. A young man with thick brown hair in a lopsided agricultural cut, shoulders slumped in defeat. Beside him sat a woman, legs bare and folded under her, hair brushed back from a pale face, T-shirt crumpled. She rubbed the heel of her hand into an eye socket, trying to drive away the tiredness, or a memory. He caught her eye and smiled but she fled, the open pub door revealing packing crates on the quarry-tiled floor of the bar.

The man let her go, spilling his tea out in the dust.

The rest of the villagers, sullen and wary, watched the half-hearted little theatre put on for the media: the old soldier arranged before the memorial like a living prop, flanked by the widows. Opposite the inn was a terrace of four stone almshouses, little Victorian castles complete with stone windows and Gothic ironwork. The residents, four elderly men and a woman, sat on a bench outside, stoic in the face of an unseemly invasion of their village. Then a shout went up, from down The Dring, where two soldiers were trying to get an old woman through her cottage door, failing to disguise the fact she didn’t want to leave.

The woman was crying, unsteady on her feet. ‘Please,’ she kept saying, ‘Please, no.’ Her features had dissolved into a mask of anxiety, like a child’s.

The crowd, milling, began to boo and someone lobbed a brick towards one of the army Land Rovers, where it landed on the bonnet. Pebbles and dirt began to fly in the air and the TV camera lights thudded into full action. The elderly woman had fainted and had to be half carried to a waiting ambulance, but behind her the front door of her home was already being boarded up. Further along The Dring an army detail was moving past the old cottages, padlocking doors and closing windows. Glass shattered, prompting more boos from the crowd.

‘You might have the decency to fucking wait,’ shouted a man, his face red and damp with alcohol.

‘Come on, boys,’ said another voice, and the crowd visibly shrank back. ‘Beer’s free – don’t waste it.’ It was the young man from the doorstep of the pub, his tea mug still in hand. ‘It’s too late for trouble – it’s over.’

Dryden tried to judge his age – mid-twenties perhaps, but with a kind of world-weary authority which made him seem older. He led them away, down by the inn where the army had provided lunch in boxes on trestle tables and a last barrel stood out in the shade on blocks. There was a bit more shouting but it was clear now that they didn’t have the heart for a real fight. It was their pride which was at stake, not their homes. They were gone.

The soldiers, sensing the mood, regrouped and slipped away to the tents, neat rows of bleached white, like a Boy Scout camp. Dryden tried to gather some quotes from the men by the inn but most shook their heads, ashamed of their impotence now that the end had come.