Chapter 3

You always know after you are two.

Two is the beginning of the end.

From Peter Pan

Craienoir Farm, Le Foyer, Ancre Valley, France

For a fragment of a second, following the loud bang, which echoes through the nearby wood, the world stands still.

The birds in the trees are silenced. Beneath them, a vixen, which had been watching the child in the garden, cowers to the ground, teeth bared. The bees and other swarming creatures take a beat out of their busy schedule. Only a slight wind, brushing against the leaves, breaks an absolute silence.

Then, almost as quickly as it ends, it begins again with one songbird, then another and then another until the whole valley is once more alive with the sounds of spring in north-eastern France.

In the corner of this foreign field sits an Englishman. James Gray is lolling in a garden chair on the wide terrace outside his home. He is drinking his first coffee of the day and flipping through the pages of an old journal with a battered leather cover.

As James had settled down to read that morning he had been aware of the sound of cow bells some miles off towards the town. Further still, somewhere near the marketplace a dog had been barking at a delivery van. He had grown used to these background noises, although the dog still made a chill run through his spine.

Now, as he turns the pages of the journal, the life in the garden, the wind in the trees and the sounds of the valley are sucked away into a vacuum and James no longer notices the outside world. He is in a place called Etaples watching a young soldier being called away from bayonet practice by a drill sergeant. James follows him as he crosses the parade ground to a small hut where two officers and a man in a suit and a stiff collar are waiting for him. The uniforms are standing. The suit is sitting behind a desk.

The young soldier is about to be shown a very different weapon of war and given his orders.

It was as James read about Private Gray’s special assignment that the gentle breeze swept up through the valley to shimmy the tall poplars which marked the boundary of his land. Then there was the bang and he is back in his world.

James spills a small drop of coffee on his jeans. A farmer after rabbits? No! It is something else; something just as much a part of this landscape.

‘The past is calling to us in its loud voice,’ James says to himself and smiles.

He looks up from the notebook and watches his youngest daughter, Picardy, playing on the lawn. She looks back at her father and grins.

‘Is it working ok, Pic?’ He asks

The child nods and returns to her new toy. It is a big plastic tape recorder; bright red with a yellow, oversized microphone and a green carrying strap. She had spotted it in a toyshop in Albert and fallen in love. James thought she wanted to play her story tapes on it, but she was more interested in collecting her own sounds. She had mastered the device quickly and her little fingers operated the buttons with skill. She had just captured the brief silence that had followed the loud bang. Now, Picardy is interviewing a number of soft toys and dolls - all named after members of her family - neatly arranged in a semi-circle around her on the well-kept grass.

Picardy is small for her age with dark eyes and a mop of black hair. She reminds James of a nervous, cub-like creature when she plays. Mowgli. She is so different to her brother and sister.

James has a memory of tears streaming down his face as he watched Picardy leave the relative safety of her mother’s womb and enter, screaming and messy, into the world. It was one of the few images of a bloodied child James carried in his head which he didn’t want to shake away.

Sometimes he thought people were accusing him of being over protective towards Picardy - but those few who knew the story remained silent.

James had arrived in the Ancre Valley (he called it the Valley of the Somme), with his family in tow, the previous year. Sanctuary: A far cry from the Balkans, Timisoara and the killing rooms of Westminster and Washington and the Hague. As they had arrived the line in the sand was once again beginning to show through on the maps of the desert … But James wasn’t moving. Not then and not now. Now, he was sitting, drinking strong coffee and listening to French cow bells.

He had always known when it was time to move on and when it was stay put – always. He knew, even in the playgrounds of his schooldays. This time it had been Craienoir Farm, at the end of a winding track, beckoning to him.

Almost a century before, the British had marched through its dung-spattered courtyard singing their own version of It’s a long way to Tipperary. At the time James had thought a couple of the lines appropriate. He could even hear the soldiers now, singing through the sounds of the garden.

‘Hooray, pour le Francais. Farewell Angleterre’

James takes another sip of Arabica and remembers the day they had hammered out a deal with the agent and agreed to buy the place: He and Annie are standing together looking out of an upstairs window holding hands. James had been watching his children across the garden in the old orchard. James had waved to them and had felt Annie looking at him.

‘She’s begging us to possess her,’ Annie had said.

‘She needs a lot of work?’ … but James is thinking, Yes. This is right. This is the place.

Smitten. In love at second sight with the crumbling walls and smells of cooking and dirt from forgotten families; In love with how they had followed the twisting path to its door and seen a future for them both. Hers: the peace it would bring when she left him. His: the sounds of men moving up to the front still echoing down the years and buffeting around the courtyard.

These memories seep across the pages of the journal and for that brief moment James was back from the war; back with his wife and family. Home. And then he is alone again, in the garden, with Picardy.

‘The past is shouting at us’

James tucks a small packet of well-thumbed letters inside the journal and hears his own father’s voice from deep inside the sheets of his hospital bed. ‘Take them Jamie, read them and find the truth. Tell the story, find out what happened and set the record straight…for the family.’ James closes the journal.

Once more he looks up at the child on the lawn. Then his attention is drawn, as it so often is, to the line of neat poplars at the far edge the orchard. His eyes follow it until they settle on the two at the end of the row. They are taller and stronger than the rest; a different species perhaps. They stand out from the others, giving the impression that they are leading their smaller brothers and sisters away into the adjoining woods.

James feels the tears welling behind his sunglasses. He switches his gaze from the landscape back to Picardy. He forces another smile but he knows the darkness is coming; the ‘Stray, Black Dog’ he had read about in the books he’d been leant afterwards.

James feels his head start to throb and his hands shake. His throat tightens. The bright morning sun slips behind a small wisp of cloud. He remembers a line from a newspaper report on the funeral of a murdered child, where it was described as hiding its face in shame.

There are dark clouds bruising the sky beyond the tree line.

The fox slinks away through the undergrowth back to her lair. She is carrying her first litter.

James calls to his youngest daughter.

‘Picardy. Come in and play now, it’s going to rain.’

The child looks up and can see only clear sky. She frowns. Then she looks at her father. Even with the sunglasses covering his eyes she understands. She is used to his sudden changes; the dark, silent moments in her father’s life before the birdsong returns.

He walks back to the house and is caught up on the step by the little girl. She slips her hand into his and he squeezes it gently.

How life changes: Huge changes in such small fragments of time. And now, even Annie has left; fled back to England. James looks out across the valley. For a moment, as always, he thinks he can see them making their way home through the fields for supper. But Freddie and Flora are gone; missing; disappeared. They had set out one bright morning on their bicycles for a picnic and had not been seen since. They had vanished off the face of the earth. That was two months after they has taken possession of the keys to the farm and the farm had possessed them.

He had come to France to investigate one family mystery and now he had two. For the second time members of the Gray family were missing on the Somme. In the next few seconds he was to discover that the answers to both where wrapped around each other; entwined.

As Father and child enter the house through the French windows Picardy’s tape recorder, which she had left on the lawn, clicks into life. James turns towards the sound and stands still, frozen and unable to speak for a moment. This is not one of Picardy’s tapes. He looks down at his child. She is already looking back at him with her large, dark eyes.