“Wasn’t he rather old to join up?”
“That made no odds to him. He joined up as Sergeant Instructor at the first go-off, an’ when the Battalion was ready he got ’imself sent along. He wangled me into ’is Platoon when I went out—early in ’Seventeen. Because Ma wanted it, I suppose.”
“I’d no notion you knew him that well,” was Keede’s comment.
“Oh, it made no odds to him. He ’ad no pets in the Platoon, but ’e’d write ’ome to Ma about me an’ all the doin’s. You see,” Strangwick stirred uneasily on the sofa, “we’d known him all our lives—lived in the next street an’ all.... An’ him well over fifty. Oh dear me! Oh dear me! What a bloody mix-up things are, when one’s as young as me!” he wailed of a sudden.
But Keede held him to the point. “He wrote to your Mother about you?”
“Yes. Ma’s eyes had gone bad followin’ on air-raids. ’Blood-vessels broke behind ’em from sittin’ in cellars an’ bein’ sick. She had to ’ave ’er letters read to her by Auntie. Now I think of it, that was the only thing that you might have called anything at all——”
“Was that the Aunt that died, and that you got the wire about?” Keede drove on.
“Yes—Auntie Armine—Ma’s younger sister an’ she nearer fifty than forty. What a mix-up! An’ if I’d been asked any time about it, I’d ’ave sworn there wasn’t a single sol’tary item concernin’ her that everybody didn’t know an’ hadn’t known all along. No more conceal to her doin’s than—than so much shop-front. She’d looked after sister an’ me, when needful—hoopin’ cough an’ measles—just the same as Ma. We was in an’ out of her house like rabbits. You see, Uncle Armine is a cabinet-maker, an’ second-’and furniture, an’ we liked playin’ with the things. She ’ad no children, and when the War came, she said she was glad of it. But she never talked much of her feelin’s. She kept herself to herself, you understand.” He stared most earnestly at us to help out our understandings.
“What was she like?” Keede inquired.
“A biggish woman, an’ had been ’andsome, I believe, but, bein’ used to her, we two didn’t notice much—except, per’aps, for one thing. Ma called her ’er proper name, which was Bella; but Sis an’ me always called ’er Auntie Armine. See?”