Christmas 1944, Southampton
Clare -- and The Magi
The cards are corralled in a huge wooden bowl, and each day they pile higher, eventually spilling over. Some of the signatures on them remain faceless to me, but names have become familiar through yearly repetition. A few from my army buddies and wartime friends, their names on cards surrounded by those of total strangers -- wives and children, even grandchildren.
I sometimes think the enormous trough of cards is like a disorganized notebook for an epic Tolstoian novel. Many of the greetings include lengthy notes and long newsletters advising us of births and deaths, marriages and divorces, professional advances or setbacks, relocations and travel. Children we've never met have grown up on those scribbled pages.
We are always too busy before Christmas to peruse the cards at leisure. But in those rare still and quiet moments, perhaps early mornings while the rest of the family sleeps, one of us will pause before that towering mound and turn over the cards until one demands attention.
Here is Clare's, as brief and taciturn as ever. I'm aware of the discipline and effort required of him to write anything. So much easier to neglect correspondence and hope our paths will cross again -- against the bar at O'Hare probably, myself between planes in Chicago, where he lives.
We spent a memorable pre-Christmas week together in '44 at Southampton, though neither of us can lay claim to having seen that great port. We arrived on troop trucks in dark and fog and were herded inside a public park that had been converted into a fenced, guarded, tented debarkation area for France. Blackout and persistent fog prevented us from seeing anything beyond a few yards. We could hear trams and, somewhere outside the perimeters of the park, shoppers, bells, broadcasts of Christmas music. Even daylight hours, locked in fog, gave us no glimpse of anything beyond our tents.
Quartermaster stores were low, we were told, cigarettes and liquor unavailable. A rumor persisted that that was not the case, that supplies were being channeled to the black market. I remember Clare, a chain-smoker, searching in the rutted, frozen mud for discarded butts. There was a mutinous talk among the men of going over the fence, raiding officers' quarters -- anything to get tobacco and a drop of Christmas cheer.
One night we passed the chaplain's tent and heard soldiers inside caroling. The sound was unreal, a sweet sanity no longer relevant to anything we knew. Clare and I walked on. And when, inevitably, the air-raid sirens wailed, we felt a sense of propriety at this return to normalcy. Carols, sentiment, brotherly love -- these seemed blasphemous at that time, in that place.
Yet, something more than privation of cigarettes and drink tore at Clare's insides. The dreariness of the camp, the men's surliness, and the sounds of Southampton out beyond the fog kept his nerves raw and his face hard. We silently stomped the ruts together, fighting cold, fighting thoughts of the season. I observed him ministering roughly, with a harsh and angry tenderness, to young green recruits at the breaking point.
Late Christmas Eve, while men huddled morosely about tent stoves, I became aware that Clare had been missing since dusk. And I guessed where. He eventually appeared in the canvas doorway, broad-grinned, his arms piled high with gifts -- cartons of cigarettes, boxes of chocolates, and bottles of brandy. The black-market rumors had proved true -- and the storehouse vulnerable.
If we thought it then, as merriment spread throughout the camp, we failed to say so. But now, as I hold Clare's card, its bright design prompts me to utter the word aloud -- Magi.
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