The Rowntree Memorial Park is full of white swans this afternoon, showing off their snowy feathers. I’ve never seen a black swan, mind. They never even thought there could be such a bird, not till that Dutchman found them in Australia. But I knew a black swan. My Charlie. Like that poet said “a good man is as rare as a black swan.” And he was, was Charlie. Was. See my brooch. Lovely innit? From his last leave. Look at it sparkling in the sun, like it was alive. Alive, alive, oh. You can’t help wondering can you? If he had an inkling that he was going to catch it. Everyone admires the way two silver hearts entwine with the ivy and the arrows, see? Me and him. Them words. “The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent, one from another.” Lovely words. Something to look after me till he came back and we married. A fresh start together, he promised. But the Lord never did watch him, because Charlie, he ain’t coming back. Not now, not ever. I didn’t really know about the strain. Pleased as punch to see me he was, that last leave, joking that he had two paradises. One was with me and the other one was the furthest trench from the enemy. I thought I knew what he meant. He had a little stammer and some headaches. Anyone can feel under the weather. You can’t imagine a hundredth of it, even if you’ve seen Battle of the Somme at the Picture House. But something had happened. Something had upset the working of his brain, you see. The other week, his brother Gilbert came to see me special, to tell me about it. Charlie deserved no white feathers. He wasn’t no shirker, no malingerer, no rotter - but that’s what his CO called him, before he sent him to the compound for punishment. ‘Field Punishment Number One’, they called it. I thought it meant cleaning the officers’ mess. Doing latrines or something. What would I know? Tell me, I said, I have too many missing pieces. Gently, if such a thing can be gently told, Gilbert explained. He showed me with drawings and his own gestures. How they tied Charlie to a cross. How they left him there, within range of the enemy’s shell-fire, for at least two hours a day – and often more - for nearly 90 days. For the Almighty to decide his fate. They said. Crucifixion, they called it. There was no standard procedure. Nothing in the regulations, but that was how they dealt with men like him. Charlie had forced his hand, said the CO. Charlie’s existence could not be justified, he said, and he stopped his pay and then he sent him to hell, a dog’s den they named ‘Mud Farm.’ Sometimes, said Gilbert, they used a wheel of a company limber to tie the man to, but Charlie, he got a cross. That was Charlie’s Golgotha. A willow stump, twice the height of a man and they tied him to it. They were no apprentice boys neither, pulling and straining at them ropes until they cut his ankles and his knees, and his wrists. They knew just what they was doing, hanging him so tight he couldn’t hardly move. Most knots will slacken after a while, but Gilbert said these ones never did. And so, day after day, come sun, come shower, come blizzard, they left him there; starving, straining, numbing and cramping in all the weather. His hands blackening with the build up of blood. Going downhill a little bit more every day. Sometimes after they tied him up, they stood about watching like he was a moving picture, watching as the mud and the fire flew, them roaring shells coming at him thick and fast, though of course, they made sure they was all well out of range. Then, hours later, the sergeant might remember to release him and Charlie would drop, lying in that slimy mud until he got enough circulation to stumble and fall all the way back to his tent, to lay his stiff, sore limbs on his floorboard bed. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he wrote to Gilbert, ‘because they can’t do anything more to me now, unless they kill me.’ I couldn’t bear to think of him hanging there, a living scarecrow, suffering while all the passers-by was staring at him, cars full of officers slowing right down to get a better view. Wondering at him like he was a circus curiosity. But they never broke his spirit. The CO never got that feather in his cap. Gilbert says that Charlie never gave them the satisfaction of a groan. Never made a single sound, but to complain only once, and that was of thirst, just before he passed out. Turned out he was ill with the influenza. He died at the field hospital at Etaples, days later. He was on his way home. That was February 14, 1919. Gone but not forgotten. Sympathy and regret at your loss. Et cet-er-bloody-rah. The Germans were supposed to be bombing the bridge, see, but they kept on hitting his field hospital. Too many men were dying there, so the officers did something quite clever really. They gave Charlie a communal grave. Sounds friendly don’t it. A companionable way to end up, if they can’t get you home. But then Gilbert, who was a bit cut up, told me it meant they put Charlie in a mine crater with 56 other men who died that day. I wonder where they put all them flowers we sent, I said to Gilbert.
They wrote down ‘bronchial pneumonia’ as the cause on his death certificate. Then Gilbert met a friend from their regiment, an eye-witness. This fellow says the heliotrope cyanosis did for Charlie. It sounds like an exotic flower or a butterfly, I said when Gilbert told me. After all the ways they tried to kill him, Charlie drowned in his own fluids. Leaving me with a promise and a brooch. And the Lord, if he can be bothered to watch. Don’t the smell of chocolate in the air make you queasy? Sickly sweet with the factories boiling up for Christmas. Mind you, a lot of things turn my stomach now. For a start, I won’t go near the New Walk after it’s flooded, leaving all that slimy mud, like a stinking fudge icing. Too much like what they made him wade through to go over the top in France. And, I won’t go past the California lilac by the Terry Avenue entrance no more, neither. But that’s down to the colour, more than the smell. I look at them blue blossoms and I see Charlie’s face, heliotrope-hungry for air. My absent swan, turned blue.

S.M. Powley