The man who came back:
Gary Nightingale

This photograph is in this month’s village magazine. It shows a couple standing outside the Kings Arms Hotel. It is now a community-run pub, still called the Kings Arms. The railings and balcony in this photo are still there. (You can check out their website – they do great food and hold a regular pub quiz.) The photo was given to the pub by a visitor, but they gave no details as to its origins. So, the identity of this couple is a mystery.

When I saw this photo, I really felt that I wanted to write something, though I had no idea what. So, I just started typing. And this is what came out:

I was in France when the guns stopped. We came home and we were heroes. But not for long. The world didn’t want to see us. Didn’t want to know us. We were like actors from a theatre they didn’t want to visit anymore. So, I put on my civvy suit and took my certificates into one damned school after another. It was like I didn’t exist. I was a ghost. In me they saw the ghosts of their own lost sons sitting across from their desk. They didn’t want a ghost teaching history to their children. They didn’t want to think about their history. I was their history. We were their history.

So, while the rest of the country drank champagne and danced the Charleston, we were forgotten. I thought of my friends who would never leave France. In a hundred years from now, farmers would graze their sheep over them without even knowing. I didn’t sleep – not much. And when I did, I was woken by nightmares. Gas and barbed wire. Panicking horses. Screams and cries in the fire and smoke.

Then I got a letter. There’s work on the farms. Patti’s brother lent us one of his cars – a 1912 Ford. We packed up, jumped in, and headed south.

Took us a week to get to the border of Somerset and Devon. The Ford kept overheating and we had to stop overnight wherever we were. I knew how to keep her running – you get resourceful in the trenches – so she always lived to travel another day.

Exeter. And further south, along the coast, where the listing fishing boats squat in the wide mudflats like abandoned tanks.

We came to a tiny village called Strete. With the money we had left, we booked in at a place called The Kings Arms Hotel. I put on my suit and went out to find work. I didn’t take my certificates with me.

But I liked it here immediately. These people didn’t see a hero or a ghost. They saw a man who could stick a pitchfork in a haybale and toss it onto a trailer. Yes, I could do that, and I was glad of it. I don’t wear the suit anymore.

We stayed in the Kings Arms for three weeks. I did some joining work for them and Patti helped in the kitchen. For that they gave us a good rate. In the evenings we sat in the garden overlooking Start Bay. I drank the local cider. It was like nothing I had ever tasted before. Sullen and sweet, like a horse that will either nuzzle your face or kick you into the road, and you never know which it’s going to be.

Patti sipped wine, bitter and dry.

We got offered a cottage on the edge of the farm. It wasn’t much – one downstairs room and one upstairs, connected with a ladder through a trapdoor. But it was ours and it was home.

Patti got restless. Our dinner table became an arena of stony silence. So much I wanted to say to her, to tell her, to show her. So much I wanted her to show me. All those new ideas spinning around in her mind. Her visions of a different future, not just for women, but for all of us. I wanted us to talk.

But I didn’t know where to start. Or how. The door was closed. I wondered if, like the rest of the country, Patti didn’t want to see the ghost. She didn’t want to see what I had seen. She wanted the man who came back, but she didn’t want the man who didn’t come back. Because, when you come back, a part of you stays there. A part of you joins your fallen friends in the ground and lies with them, waiting for the slow roll of the seasons to bring new pastures and sheep grazing at your head.

The women in the village didn’t like my wife. They didn’t care about getting the vote and they didn’t like her fanciful ideas. Patti detested them and, in turn, she hated this village. She said to me, don’t they realise women died for that vote?

I wondered what I had died for.

Here’s a strange thing. When I enlisted, I knew I was going to survive the war, however long it lasted. It wasn’t confidence or cocksureness; I was not a gung-ho kid. I was a professional man doing my duty. It wasn’t hope. It was . . . knowledge. I just knew I would live.

And so, as we ate our simple meals in deepening, darkening silence, I knew too that this was over. We had both gone, and neither of us was coming back. In due course, I would come home from work one day to find the Ford gone. And I would stay, filling my days with labour and shielding from the terrors at night with cider. And if a day came when they no longer needed me here, I would move on.

Both of us would move on – the man who came back, and the man who didn’t.