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Everyone has childhood trauma, if they want to look at it that way. The trick, in Dan Hagman's opinion, was not to look too closely or too often.
The more Dan thought about things, the more he reckoned that every one of them in this little band was lucky to be alive and halfway sane. Of course, the word “trauma” wasn’t one he’d normally use, it was a new one on him, but somehow, being around Harris and his educated ways was starting to rub off on the rest of them.
“It just means wound, Dan. Injury.” Harris had explained. “It comes from Greek. But it’s becoming more frequently used to mean mental damage.”
Dan had laughed. “Oh aye, I know a bit about that. So do you, I reckon.”
Harris had tried to brush it off, but you can’t take back things once they’ve been said, and one of the things Harris had said on the boat to Portugal last summer, when he was still drunk from the leaving, was that his old man had been a drunk like himself.
“Not quite like myself,” he’d said in that over-thoughtful kind of way he had. “Or at least... Well, I flatter myself that I am in some small way better than him. I have more education than him, thanks to my dear mother, and I believe that makes a difference in the matter of self-awareness.”
Dan believed in letting people say their piece, and if he had anything to say when they were done, well, that was the time to say it, not while they were still trying to get their minds around the enormity of what they were saying. You didn’t interrupt a man digging into his worst memories, not unless he showed signs of jumping in and staying there.
But he’d always understood that the main point about a drunk was that they didn’t have self-awareness. You surely wouldn’t do that to yourself if you really thought about it. He hadn’t said anything back then, but Harris did like to bang on about self-awareness and how it had been the making of him, and he was doing it again now, which was probably what had got Dan thinking about trauma in the first place. He decided that this time he wasn’t in the mood for letting it pass.
“Oh aye?”
Harris smiled ruefully.
“I know, Dan, and you’re right. But I really do understand myself a bit better now than I did back then. The Lieutenant has helped with that, of course.”
Now they’d got to know the Lieutenant a little better, Harris could, and did, talk about him for hours - “a simply fascinating case, Dan, almost entirely ignorant, certainly no education to speak of, and yet one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met” - but right now Dan was more interested in things he hadn’t heard before. So he broke his own rule and hurried in with a question.
“What kind of a drunk was he? Your old man, I mean. Not a happy chap, I don’t suppose?”
Harris looked bleak for a moment. “The usual, Dan. You’ve seen it all. Drinking his wages so we went hungry; beating us, beating my mother. Fighting anyone who looked at him wrongly, as he saw it.”
“Funny how they all turn aggressive, isn’t it,” Dan commented. “Well, not funny, obviously. Odd, I suppose. And what about your mother? Did she treat you right?”
Harris brightened. “Oh, my mother was a wonderful woman. Now she did have an education, and she taught me to read and write. Secretly of course, he didn’t like her ‘putting on airs’ as he called it, and he’d have been even worse if he’d thought she was teaching us her ‘fancy stuck-up ways’.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I’m never convinced it makes sense to force men to marry just because they’ve got a bastard on a girl.”
“Better than the parish having to look after her and the babby, though.”
Harris went quiet and seemed suddenly to tire of the subject. “And what about you, Dan? Did you have a happy childhood?”
Dan laughed. “Oh aye, not as bad as yourn, I’d say. Till I were eight or so, anyway, but I were half grown by then so it didn’t matter. Well, it did matter, it mattered a lot, but I’m not going to sit here and claim it ruined my ‘childhood’, because childhood’s only for them as has money. The rest of us is just people too small and silly to work, or people old enough to be useful.”
There was silence between them for a few minutes, and the normal sounds of the camp at rest drifted on the evening air. Somewhere in the distance Tongue was arguing with Cooper about something, and after a moment Sergeant Harper could be heard shouting at them both. Dan and Harris both smiled.
“So if I may ask, Dan?” Harris sounded unusually tentative, so Dan knew what was coming. To give himself another moment he said,
“Aye?”
“What happened when you were eight?”
He’d told the story enough times by now, but there had been a lot of re-arranging of companies while they’d all been at Shorncliffe and somehow Harris had never heard it before. He decided to keep it brief.
“Father got took up for poaching.”
“Ah. Just like you, then?”
“Not quite like me, no. I were given choice of army or prison. Father had laid in a mantrap overnight before they found him and took him in.” The young Dan’s first thought had been that at least he was alive, that he hadn’t been shot by the gamekeeper, but still he had not been allowed to go with his mother to see his father in the little village lockup. She had come back from her first visit white and shaking.
“It’s his leg, Dan” she had said quietly, so the younger ones wouldn’t hear. “It’s all mangled and bloody. He can’t stand on it and they won’t even bandage it for him. The best that can happen is he’ll be a cripple for life and never work again.”
The best hadn’t happened, and it had been a slow and painful death, but by that time Dan was already bringing in night-acquired rabbits and the occasional game bird, so at least they hadn’t starved.
In the silence after Dan finished telling the story he thought about the rest of their tiny band, and what kind of childhoods they might have had.
Isaiah Tongue he knew a little of, because, never having had a family, that he would remember or admit to, anyway, the lad had simply appeared at Shorncliffe one day soon after the battalion arrived, and had been hanging around ever since, making himself useful. He’d said it was better than living on the street, but he’d looked well enough fed when he arrived, so wherever he’d been living, Dan wasn’t convinced it was on the street. Still young enough to pose no threat, he’d managed to ingratiate himself with the battalion women, and when the names had been drawn for the handful of wives who were to accompany their men to Portugal, he’d somehow got himself on board the ship with them.
Dan wasn’t convinced Tongue had ever actually sworn the oath, but he was desperate to fit in, and his name was in the paybook and that was all that mattered.
His thoughts moved on to the recently-promoted Sergeant Harper. On the face of it, unlike Harris and Tongue, the Sergeant didn’t seem damaged at all. Although... Dan thought about that some more. The Sergeant would talk till the cows came home about all his relatives - and what strange ones they were, Dan was never convinced half of them were real, they all seemed a bit too convenient to whatever point the Sergeant wanted to make at the time - but it seemed to Dan he’d only ever mentioned his father once.
“He was a drunken brute,” the Sergeant had said. “A big useless bastard I never want to think about again.”
So many drunken bastard men ruining other folks’ lives, Dan had thought. He was fond of a sup himself, but it never made him angry, just forget his words sometimes. Life was too short for being angry, he'd always thought, and he had never pressed Harper, even before he was a Sergeant, for more information than he wanted to give.
Francis Cooper, by contrast, was one of those that would tell you everything and nothing, a constant flow of empty, boasting words. They knew all about his exploits at stealing, his skill with a picklock, his wide network of contacts throughout Shoreditch and beyond who would take anything he’d stolen and give him a good price for it, but they knew nothing at all about his family. Whether he’d been taught to steal by his father - if he’d even known his father - was just one of the many things he never talked about.
And that was their little band of Chosen Men, misfits all of them, led by the biggest misfit of them all, a whore’s bastard brought up in an orphanage then the workhouse, who had marched in the ranks for years, before being promoted to the Officer’s Mess and promptly thrown out into the middle of nowhere with them to survive or not on his own.
To hear him tell it, at least he hadn’t had a drunken father to contend with, though whether he saw that as a good thing or not wasn’t clear. The Lieutenant made no attempt to hide his origins, in fact he seemed to enjoy embarrassing his betters by mentioning that his mother had been a whore, but never a word on whether he’d like to have had a father.
The Lieutenant had been a thief too before the army, like Cooper, something else he was open about, though it was typical of him that he’d got away with it for years and had been almost sixteen and running away from a murder charge when he’d finally taken the shilling.
Dan thought again about Mr Sharpe being a child of the workhouse. Dan knew what the workhouse was like. He’d not been taken in himself, being handy with a sling and his father’s shotgun when all law-abiding folk were in bed, but his father’s brothers had mostly been drunks too and plenty of their children had ended up in the grim stone building at the edge of the moor. The few that had ever survived to come out had been pale, weak little things who cringed if you spoke too loudly or moved too fast. Until he’d met the Lieutenant, Dan had always thought that was just what happened to people in there, but the Lieutenant was quite different. Came of always being stronger-willed than anyone else around him, Dan reckoned.
But he thought the workhouse was probably where the self-awareness came from. All very well for Harris, with his mother’s education, to be surprised at a man without a day’s schooling knowing himself pretty well, but Dan thought that for a man of intelligence and strong will, having nothing to do with all that mind and willpower every day, and - knowing him - scared of nothing and no-one, you’d have to spend your time thinking about what you’d do when you got out, when you finally had the choice what to do with yourself all day. Even if that did only turn out to be thieving on your own account rather than for others.
And to Dan’s way of thinking, you couldn’t think about your life without thinking about yourself, who you were and what you could do. What you could put up with and what you knew you couldn’t survive. So aye, it made sense that the Lieutenant knew himself pretty well, Dan thought. Too well, perhaps, always aware he was different from the other officers and always worrying what they thought of him. He couldn’t just ignore his differences and settle down with them.
The Sergeant had told Dan once the Lieutenant hated going into the Mess for that very reason. He always felt out of place, sure that the other officers were sneering at him. Dan had never asked Harper how he knew that, but as far as Dan could gather, most of the other officers were simply envious of Mr Sharpe’s record of achievements and jealous of the way he was so often briefed personally by Wellington himself while they received their orders down the line of hierarchy as was proper.
Dan looked across at Harris and grinned, happy to be near the bottom of the marching dunghill that was the army at war. When it came right down to it, Lieutenant Sharpe’s awkwardness was proof that even officers can have childhood trauma, and you don’t always get the choice to ignore it.
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