The Gartside Memorial, by Edwin Hollis
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
The committee met in the schoolroom on the first Tuesday of every month, because the schoolroom had a stove and the vestry did not. By March 1920 they had chosen the stone, a grey slab from the quarry above Gartside, and the mason, and the words to be cut at the top. All that remained was the list.
Colonel Ferrand read it aloud from a sheet of foolscap: twenty-three names, in alphabetical order, from Allott to Wormald. When he had finished he took off his spectacles, polished them on his handkerchief and asked whether there was any other business.
Mrs Haigh stood up at the back. She had not been invited, and nobody had seen her come in. She was a small woman in a brown coat that had been her husband’s, cut down to fit her, and she held her handbag in front of her with both hands, as if somebody might try to take it. Everyone in Gartside knew what had happened to her son in France, though nobody had ever said it in her hearing.
‘You have missed one,’ she said.
The Colonel looked at the vicar, and the vicar looked at the stove.
‘Albert Haigh. Private. West Riding Regiment. Twenty years old.’
‘Mrs Haigh.’ The Colonel spoke gently, which was somehow worse than if he had shouted. ‘You know why that is not possible. This memorial is for the men who gave their lives.’
‘He gave it. They took it off him at the finish, but he gave it first. He gave them two years of it before that.’
Mr Sugden, the butcher, cleared his throat. ‘There are families in this village who would not stand for it, Martha. Families who lost lads who did their duty and didn’t run.’
‘I know them all,’ said Mrs Haigh. ‘I sat with half of them when their letters came. Nobody sat with me.’ She did not raise her voice. ‘I had a letter as well. Mine said nine o’clock in the morning, and that it was quick.’
Nobody looked at her after that. The vote was taken by a show of hands, and the Colonel counted them twice, though there was no need. Seven to one. The one was the schoolmistress, Miss Lumb, who went pink to the ears and kept her hand up for longer than anybody expected.
Mrs Haigh nodded, as if she had been told the price of something she could not afford. ‘Thank you for hearing me,’ she said, and went out into the dark.
The memorial was unveiled on a wet Sunday in October. A band came over from Keighley, and the Colonel read the twenty-three names in his parade-ground voice, and after each one the crowd murmured ‘We will remember them’ a fraction behind him, like an echo coming back off the fell.
When he had finished and folded his paper, a voice spoke from the edge of the crowd. It was not loud, but it was very clear in the silence before the hymn.
‘Albert Haigh.’
For a moment nobody answered. Then, from somewhere near the front, a second voice said it, which was Miss Lumb’s, and then a third, a man’s, deep and unsteady, that nobody afterwards would own to. The bandmaster lifted his baton and lowered it again. Mrs Haigh did not turn round to see who had spoken. She stood in her cut-down coat with the rain running off the brim of her hat, and she did not move until the last of the crowd had gone home.
“Mrs Haigh is presented as a woman who has been defeated by her grief and by her village.”
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