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But more painful than any physical damage was the mental scarring. Alan found it almost impossible to sleep in his first-floor bedroom. The wide windows and exposed position made him feel vulnerable to the shell and rifle fire that he continually expected. After three nights of struggling with his fears, he gave in, and took over a boxroom on the ground floor, built like a bunker and with a four-foot stone wall between him and the outside. He slept with a candle burning all night.
Across the hall, in the nursery, there was a large-scale map of the Zagros mountains: a map that Tom had put there fourteen years before. A blue pencil line in Tom’s wobbly nine-year-old hand marked out the family oil concession. Some nights when sleep was hard to come by, and the air laboured in and out of his struggling lungs, Alan took his candle and went into the nursery, staring at the rough contours of the map, in the mountains north of Shiraz. He had promised Tom he’d go there and find whatever there was to be found. Would it be oil or just dry earth? There was no way to find out, except the good old-fashioned way: with a drill.
Some mornings, when dawn had broken over the winter sky, he was still there in his nightshirt, with his candle, looking at the map and wondering, wondering …
It sometimes felt as though finding oil was the most important thing in the entire world.
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Norgaard rolled over on his bunk and handed Tom a handful of acorns.
‘Pissed up against an oak tree on my way back from the factory today. I found these.’
Norgaard had a handful himself and he began cracking the shells and crunching up the nut inside. Tom did the same, chewing carefully. His stomach was beginning to balloon outwards, but all it held was painful wind. He tried vomiting sometimes, but all he had to vomit was stale air, and the retching brought no relief. Each time that happened, he thought of Alan Montague. Anger, bitterness and self-pity jammed together in a ball that hurt every bit as much as the wind in his belly.
‘What were you up to before the war?’ asked Norgaard, ‘and I’m not asking you to list your ten biggest ever meals.’
Tom grinned. Most conversations in the camp these days were about food, or soap, or beer, or the countless other tiny things of life. ‘Oil,’ he said. ‘I was in the oil business.’
‘You don’t say?’ Norgaard sat up, dropping his acorns into the blanket. ‘On the drilling side or … ? Hey, d’you even have oil fields in England?’
Tom shook his head. ‘Marketing. And no, the country’s as dry as a bone.’
‘Bet the King’s mad as all hell about that … Which company?’
‘Standard, actually. Standard of New Jersey.’
Tom expected the patriotic Norgaard to be pleased with his reply, but instead Norgaard pursed his lips and spat. ‘Goddamn Rockefeller. Ruined the industry for all of us. And dissolution was a bust. Standard of New Jersey, my ass.’
They continued to talk. Before the war, Norgaard had been an independent oilman, a driller with his own crew.
‘And every time we sent the drill bit down, we more than half expected to hit the smell of oil. Boy, I never sharpened the drill so carefully as when I was on my own thirty acres. Every single time you do it, you could find oil sands glistening on the end of the bit.’
‘Did you ever make a strike? For yourself, I mean.’
‘Twice, just twice.’
‘Yes?’
Tom’s hunger vanished, his thoughts of home, his anger with Alan. He was transfixed, the old addiction biting harder than hunger.
‘First time was a little well up near Bradford, Pennsylvania. First day, I pumped thirty barrels. Two weeks later, eighty-five. Four weeks later, no matter what I did, the well gave me ten barrels of oil, if I was lucky. I ended up selling that well for the price of a new pair of pants. Two miles down the road, on land I’d offered on but never clinched, a friend of mine made a strike. Three thousand barrels a week that son-of-a-bitch got out of there.’
Tom breathed out in awe. This was the sharp end of the oil industry, where luck, adventure and geology all met in one glorious mix. ‘And the second strike?’
‘Second strike was sweet as a dream. I called the well Old Glory right from the start. Drilling was as easy as slicing butter. Hit gas after two thousand feet. Three hundred feet later and we were bathing our feet with oil. Six hundred barrels a day, Old Glory produced at her best, God bless her.’
‘And?’ Tom knew that Norgaard was playing with him, but he couldn’t help but fall for the man’s game. ‘And?’
‘And John D. Rockefeller stole every last drop … He owned all the refineries in the area. The price he paid for oil wasn’t hardly worth the cost of hauling it. He sweated me out of what was mine, then bought the well off me when I came begging at his door. It ain’t enough to find the oil, Tom, it’s turning it into dollars that counts.’
Over the weeks and months that followed, Norgaard continued to tell Tom of his days as an oilman in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, and ‘never did get out west to California, but if all your kings and kaisers ever get tired of fighting each other, then that’s where you’ll find me, drilling for oil in my own back yard.’
Tom’s old addiction grew again. If he ever got out of prison camp, then he knew what he would do. He’d get into the oil business: not with Alan, but by himself. Not in Persia, but in America. And not relying on anybody else’s money or goodwill, but relying only on his brains, his guts, his determination to succeed.
Stuck away in prison though he was, it sometimes felt as though finding oil was the most important thing in the entire world.
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Alan grew stronger: strong enough for his second and final operation.
In February 1917, he was sent to a specialist hospital in Southampton. He was readied for surgery and given an anaesthetic. A nurse said, ‘Count to ten for me, please. One, two, three …’
He woke up dazzled by light.
There was a screen around his bed, a couple of doctors, a stout ward sister, and a pretty nurse in the background. The doctors were arguing over treatment and criticising the way the sutures had been applied. When they noticed that Alan was awake, they began asking him questions to test out the extent of his recovery.
What year was it?
‘Nineteen thirteen.’
What month?
‘No idea.’ Alan laughed at the idiocy of the question, hoping that the doctors would be able to see the funny side. They couldn’t.
What was his name?
‘Alan.’
Alan who?
‘Creeley. Alan Creeley.’
The doctors tutted to themselves, then vanished. The ward sister looked at Alan’s bedclothes with disapproval and tucked them in so tightly that she might have been packaging her patient for shipment overseas. Then she left too.
The pretty nurse, auburn-haired, freckled, and with lovely dancing blue eyes, drew closer to the bed. She loosened the bedclothes.
‘It’s not so tidy,’ she said, ‘but at least you can breathe.’
He smiled at her. ‘I don’t think the doctors liked me much.’
‘They don’t like anyone, not unless your injury is particularly interesting.’
‘I didn’t come up to snuff, then? I feel rather as though I’ve been run over by an omnibus.’
‘Well, the operation proved rather lengthy, I’m afraid. More than expected, but nothing that won’t heal. I’ve seen worse cases do well.’
Alan realised that it must have been her who had changed his dressings and bathed him. He reddened with an old-fashioned embarrassment.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve been here two years now and I’ve seen everything.’
‘Still …’
‘Still, nothing.’ She slipped a thermometer into his mouth, forcing him to cut his protest short. ‘Mutton stew or Scotch broth for lunch?’ she said. ‘Nod if you want mutton, shake if you want the soup. The mutton’s an absolute fright, by the way.’
He shook his head.
‘Good choice. I’ve telephoned your mother and father. They’ll be here this evening. I’ve told them you’ll be a bit muzzy, but you’d love to see them. I’ll find you some vases and sneak them away for you. Pamela’s bound to bring flowers, even if she has to strip the hothouse bare.’
‘Thank –’
‘Ah! Thermometer! Don’t talk!’
‘Oree. Unk-oo.’
She took his pulse. Her fingers felt delicious on his wrist, making the rest of his battered body feel like a truck was rolling over it. The white of her uniform seemed dazzling. He watched it rise and fall as she breathed. It was the most beautiful thing … he drifted off.
When his parents did arrive that evening, they were laden with armfuls of flowers, jars of honey, bottles of barley water, and from his father, when his mother was busy with the flowers) a flask of whisky and a handful of cigars.
‘Who was that nurse?’ he asked. ‘She spoke about you as though she knew you both.’
‘The nurse? Lottie, you mean? Reddish hair, blue eyes? But Alan, darling, I’ve told you ten times already. That’s Lottie Dunlop, one of the girls who’s been staying with us this year. A lovely girl. I’ve been longing for you to meet …’
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‘Hier! Komm! Bitte schnell!’
The guard was elderly, silver-haired, Jewish. He was standing thirty yards away across the prison yard, beckoning at Tom.
Tom pointed to himself. ‘Ich? Me?’
The guard nodded.
Tom dragged himself over. A bitterly cold winter had passed into spring. Tom was still losing weight, certain now that he was dying of hunger. He was listless and apathetic. His belly stuck out, jammed tight with wind and emptiness. He caught up with the guard.
‘Ja?’
‘Hier. Ein Geschenk. Für dich.’ A present. For you.
Tom woodenly put out his hands. The guard gave him a bag of sugar, a couple of tins of goose fat, a jar of raspberry jam. Tom stared down at his treasures, hardly able to understand. The guard tried to explain further. Tom couldn’t properly follow the Jew’s accented German, but it was something to do with a Red Cross parcel that had arrived for a man recently dead. The guard had seen Tom’s state and wanted to help. Tom was so grateful – so shocked – he began to sob out thanks, like a child at Christmas. The guard waved away the thanks, told Tom to eat slowly, and left.
The gift was like a second chance at life.
Tom was tempted to wolf the lot, but knew his stomach would quickly revenge itself on him if he did. He ate the goose fat and the jam over five days and took a spoonful of sugar with a mug of cold water morning and evening. His stomach complained, but his painful wind reduced. For the first time in months, Tom felt nearly human. And, as a human, he felt ready for action.
Speaking to Norgaard in the quiet of the camp that evening, he made a proposal.
‘Let’s escape,’ he said.
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Alan recovered and Lottie Dunlop nursed him. One morning, as his brain fought its way out of its post-operation fog, he sat up in bed and tried to thank her.
‘Thank you so much for everything,’ he said. ‘I do apologise for not saying so earlier. I must have seemed very brutish. It was the anaesthetic, I suppose.’
‘Of course it was.’
‘Well, sorry anyway. It was ungentlemanly.’
She snorted out through her nose and began to clear away his tray of food.
‘You must think me very stupid,’ he said.
She stood upright, leaving his tray where it was. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. So far in this conversation you’ve called yourself a brute, ungentlemanly and now stupid. In the past couple of days, you’ve said sorry because you had dressings that needed changing. You’ve apologised for causing trouble – by which I assume you meant being honourably wounded in the service of your country. And when I tried to pay you the compliment of noticing your Military Cross you told me that you hadn’t earned it. So far, Captain Montague, I’m beginning to conclude that you’re a great nincompoop.’
He smiled. ‘Sorry.’
‘Sorry again? What is it this time?’
‘Very well then, not sorry … Miss Dunlop, may we start again? I’m Captain Alan Montague and I’m perfectly delighted to make your acquaintance.’
She bobbed in an exquisite curtsy and offered him her hand. ‘Charlotte Dunlop,’ she said. ‘Do call me Lottie.’
For six weeks, Alan recovered. At first he was embarrassed that he should be cared for so intimately by a friend and guest of his parents. Then, later, as he became well enough to be pushed round the hospital in a wheelchair, he began to understand what Lottie’s day-to-day job involved. The wing of the hospital in which she worked dealt with some of the worst cases coming over from France. She handled men who had lost both legs, who had been blinded or deafened, men whose lungs had been three-quarters destroyed by gas, who coughed black blood each time they tried to breathe too deeply. Compared with the things Lottie saw each and every day, Alan’s personal embarrassment at being bathed seemed so trivial.
They became friends.
At the end of her daily duties, Lottie came to find Alan, bringing two steaming great mugs of tea and a slice of cake from home. He learned how she had been on holiday in France when the war broke out. She’d extended her stay, ‘not wanting to travel back while the fighting was still going on – my goodness, how strange it feels to remember that now’. Staying in a hotel at Boulogne, she’d encountered some of the wounded men of the original Expeditionary Force and stayed to help. She’d been appalled by what she’d seen to begin with – ‘I must have been a very sheltered little girl, I’m afraid. I hadn’t imagined … I hadn’t even imagined what it could have been like’ – but came to find something like a vocation in her bloodstained trade. ‘I came back from France for Mummy and Daddy’s sake, but I insisted on at least coming here –’ she meant the Centre for the Very Seriously Wounded – ‘as I couldn’t stand to have become one of those ghastly debs who take a few temperatures and change a few dressings, then think they’ve earned themselves a letter of thanks from the King.’
And he, in return, told her all about himself. He found he was able to speak to her about the fighting with something approaching candour. After all, for every horror he had seen, she had heard of things every bit as bad. She had even, he reflected, witnessed more deaths at close quarters, since perhaps one-third of the men who passed through her hands were too badly injured to survive and her job kept her by their sides until the bitter end.
‘When you were concussed, you used to moan a lot in your sleep,’ she said. ‘You called out for mother – everyone does,’ she added quickly, ‘everyone – but also for Tom. That would be Tom Creeley, I suppose? The boy you grew up with.’
‘Yes, though that doesn’t quite say it. Tom was my twin. I couldn’t have been closer to him if he’d been my flesh and blood. For a few days after his death, I quite lost my head. I almost willed myself to die.’
She nodded. ‘That’s quite common, actually. It is a phase. It does pass.’
‘It has passed, I think. I miss Tom every moment – does that sound absurd? It’s true, though – but I don’t feel that my life has to end because of it. Actually, I’m getting rather keen on life.’
She smiled at him. Her smile seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world.
‘Me too, my dear captain. Me too.’
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The escape attempt was a complete success and a total failure.
One morning in May 1917, Tom found an opportunity to throw a handful of grit into the engine that drove the soda factory’s principal conveyor belt. The machinery choked and died. Sabotage was instantly suspected, and prisoners were informed that working hours would be extended until dusk that night. It was what Tom had wanted.
