This morning Luke met up with his long-time friends, Peter, a retired Professor of Archaeology and his wife, Jenny. Together, they left London to drive to France,‘ to make a pilgrimage to celebrate the men that fought in the First World War...their commitment …their comradeship.’
Now Jenny is driving through the region where the Battle of the Somme took place. Luke has always wanted to visit here; it is where his father’s eldest brother was killed.
With him in the backseat of the car, are jackets, bottles of wine, several cases of Stella and tins of Dulux, ready for him to decorate Peter’s and Jenny’s French cottage. Luke has been an artist, but to earn his bread and to once keep a wife and son, he became a decorator of other folks’ houses, now he appreciates ‘the French furrowed brown earth stretching to the horizon’. A litre of Stella adds to his enjoyment, helping to wipe out twenty years of experiencing ‘…the desolation of filling cracks, rubbing down, applying Dulux…’
They stop at a lay by called Little Vimy. Leaving the car to explore a Commonwealth Cemetery, Peter and Jenny go on ahead. Luke walks on alone. He looks up at the vertical slope far above him. ‘It made him dizzy, seeing the edge of the ridge hanging over him…Didn’t a hundred thousand men die here?’ Then he asks, ‘Comrades, you know loneliness, pain. Is it possible to blow life into the dying?’
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