FROM ENGLAND
69
We were firing into Lough Neagh, and one of our gun positions lay
but two or three hundred yards behind a row of cottages, where some of
the signallers had gone scrounging tea.
A
widow who was making tea
fainted with anticipation two minutes before each shell was fired, and the
signallers had to keep catching her. It was a pity that she missed the
flight of the shell every time, for the flight of a shell and its invisible or
smudgily visible suction upon the air can be very soothing to the nerves.
This was not very far from the border. The border haunts everybody's
mind when he is at all browned off. It is so easy to get across in civvies.
You just ride across on a bus, and nobody looks at your papers. The
trouble is that when they find you they don't intern you but merely send
you back.
On
another drill order, half the regiment wandered over the border
by mistake and stayed over it for several hours without anybody taking
any notice.
rrnummy''
That Saturday afternoon I was at the railway station getting tickets
to White Harbour for Bill Budge and myself.
A
well-made, red-haired
young man in a new overcoat was standing outside the booking-office, and
I asked him what time it was. He did not answer, so I touched his arm.
He turned rather abruptly, and when I asked him again what time it was
he touched his mouth and his ears with the tips of his fingers.
It was also a Saturday afternoon when I saw his sister for the first
time. Bill Budge and I had bought our tickets to White Harbour, and
there was half an hour to wait for the train, so we went into the boot-shop
across the road where they make you tea and toast if you want it. While
we were there drinking tea and eating toast a good-looking girl of thirty
came in and conducted some business with the cobbler. Her manner was
not conspicuous, but when she had gone the cobbler's wife, who makes
the tea and toast and who is very charming and must have been quite
beautiful in her younger days, said that the girl was deaf and dumb, that
she had a brother in the same condition as herself and that she was a very
clever girl and a dress-maker.
This was not long after our arrival in Ballyduff, and presently the
camp as a whole was aware of at least the girl's existence. She was spoken
of as "Dummy," and it was said that she ...-ed like a rattlesnake.
•
• •
•
Marshall lives in the next hut. It is the HQ drivers', Don R's and
tiffies' hut. They are a tough lot. Don R Evans, with his purple, pitted
nose and false teeth, belonged to a gang of petty thieves in Nottingham.
Averbach was a fair-ground showman. Marshall is a tall, thin fellow
built on the lines of the traditional film cowboy. He contests with another
driver and one of my sanitary orderlies the reputation of having the
largest male organ in the battery. He takes a poor view of me. When I
