BY PHILIP LOWE
My dearest wife has written her own memories in a book and has inspired me to write my own. I feel a little cautious in sharing my own memories of relationships and journeys. As long as everything I have experienced has brought me here, it is excusable.
I pray that our children do not experience the doubt, duplicity, and pain that I had.
I do not wish to deny the work my father must have effected, yet I believe, as my own future has taught me, he could have behaved differently—not only towards me.
My early teenage years became ripe picking fields. As I grew, my opinions changed.
At times, I recalled memories I thought were lost. Some were too uncomfortable. I have been able to reflect many times on motives and aspirations, yet it seems there has always been a different hand directing my path.
I do not know how my wife has relieved her life and her own difficulties. She must be so much stronger than me. Reader, I love her.
Edward’s Shooting Party
It was springtime, and one could feel the brisk wind that echoed the chills of winter. I went outside with the leather ball. I saw a team of people on horseback and a carriage arriving, the carriage pulling what looked like a large and empty cage. I ran inside and my father was called to the main door. It was late afternoon, and my mother was away.
The front door opened, and my father approached. A military officer entered with his retinue. My father ran towards him and clasped the visitor with a joy I had never seen him exhibit before. They exchanged the laughter of old friends. Then I saw them discussing a red piece of cloth tied around the visitor’s right shoulder. My father beckoned me to join them.
“Edward! This is my Edward! Edward—this is the man I met during the Peninsular War! The man who was asked by our general, Lord Wellington, for a glass of port!”
“… And when I eventually found it—he had disappeared!”
They laughed again. The visitor looked at me, smiling as he laughed with my father; he then made a motion like he was tipping his hat to me. Then he held out his hand for me to shake it. I was not wearing a hat but pretended to doff one anyway. He then shook his hand in the air, and he and my father laughed again.
A servant arrived with a flask on a tray. The visitor took a draft of it and grimaced as if it did not taste well.
“So where are these miscreants you were telling me about in your letter?”
“I will show you. You had best follow me with guns.”
He then called outside, and half a dozen men, dressed as he was (without the colour around his shoulder), ran in with rifles ready. My father went down to the kitchen, his friend close behind, and was followed by the men with rifles.
I must have been waiting for about 15 minutes. Then three men with guns emerged, then eight men, including the three moustachioed men I had seen. Then the rest of the riflemen, my father’s friend, then my father. His friend winked at me as he passed. They both went outside, the cold wind meeting their hair. Laughter continued
The criminals were made to lie on their faces outside the front door. Their hands were tied and their mouths gagged. A piece of paper was held aloft by my father’s friend, and he read aloud their accusations. He paused and smiled as if seeing them for the first time, which he probably was.
Before he spoke, he took a greedy mouthful from the flask
“On behalf of His Majesty’s Military, you are sentenced to death by firing squad; you are so sentenced given the following…”
Death? I was extremely shocked. Just then, a great deal of blossoms blew over the accused and the nearby wall.
He continued:
“You are all illegal immigrants in this country,
You are all members of the French military and deserters thereof,
You have taken to hiding in this house owned by His Majesty’s loyal servant.”
He then smiled at my father. He offered my father the flask. My father accepted it greedily.
“You have all stolen vittles from this house
You have stolen and attempted to steal artworks from this house.
You have all desecrated and written, scrawled on these walls,
Two of you have taken advantage of a member of staff on these very premises.”
Some of the accused struggled to shout negatively at these allegations, yet one shouted, “C’est inutile!” This seemed to quell dissent.
“May the Lord have mercy on your souls.” He said this last with no feeling.
With guns pointed at them, they all rose and were all permitted to spit out their gags; some required help in this respect. They were all offered a cigarette, which was placed in their mouths and lit. It was odd to see this number of soldiers smoking and their hands not touching their Carerras cigarettes.
My father’s red-shouldered friend asked one of the gunmen, “Is the carriage close enough to the gate?”
“I’ll make sure it is, sir.”
The cigarettes were collected from the men who spat into a bowl passed along like a pattern in a church.
Serious though the business was, my father and the other man appeared to be sharing a joke. Even at my age, this seemed to be neither the time nor the place for a joke.
The chief gunman and the rest trotted down to the gate, followed by “the accused.” I saw one of the gunmen leave the gate and heard the sound of a horse’s noisy trotters shifting the carriage. He then returned with a drum at his waist.
My father and his colleague began to mutter to each other; a package was handed to my father, and the two men exchanged a smile.
“It is getting cold,” suggested my father.
“And dark.”
“Will I see you next year?”
“I hope so, but things are changing—there is a lot to do.”
“How so?”
“Well, there is reorganization happening with both the military and the locals—the police.”
“But compared to the military, the police is small beer!”
“I agree, but this is the way things are; some say the military needs to control what it does, that it does or involves itself in too much. Look at what we have here…”
The gunmen near the gate had lined up the criminals against the wall.
“I do not like it. Who is in charge, and how will they benefit? Last thing I heard was they were talking of denying the use of the Brown Bess and its Brummagem bayonet.”
Faintly, I heard shots and saw all the men fall.
“Heaven knows. Oh, by the by, have you ever been to Helsinki? It is supposed to be beautiful.”
“No, why?”
“I am going there next week.”
“Be safe—I imagine it is dangerous to sail anywhere at the moment.”
The fallen men were being carried out of the gate, to the cage pulled by the carriage. I noticed the drum had never been used.
“Farewell then, my friend, and be safe.”
“Farewell to you. And to you, little man!”
He strode off towards the gate.
My father raised a hand as if to say farewell.
He said to me as he idly looked through the package he had been given, “Did you know that where there is a firing squad with one victim, one of the riflemen—and they don’t know who—is given a fake bullet so there is room to deny culpability?”
In terms of hatred for my father, something had shifted, and I didn’t understand why. His having a friend? I can not see that changing my mind. Furthermore, he’d just facilitated the deaths of many men.
The tone of my father’s voice had seemed to change; I was treated differently. Perhaps that was it. Maturity seemed to be coming my way too soon; I was becoming too old, I believed, to receive a beating; yet I still felt awful when I thought of those men being shot near that wretched wall.
How could the commander feel so little about the fallen?
[mc4wp_form id="5878"]
