Here’s a story our great grandfather kept to himself for most of his life, from back when he was in the Foresters.
Not literal foresters. The Foresters was an army regiment. Our great grandfather when he was a young man enlisted with the Foresters and went to fight in the trenches. Lucky for us he wasn’t in the part of the regiment that got sent to Gallipoli and got mostly massacred or we wouldn’t be here. Lucky he was only a bit gassed, and lucky he met our great grandmother in the military camp hospital, who didn’t know that day she met him that she’d be thumping his back to help him cough up stuff for the rest of his life for the rest of
her life.
The story goes that our great grandfather, long dead by the time we were born, only ever spoke about his time in that war once, on his deathbed, and only to one of his grandsons who was then aged about eight, who told nobody either till he told his younger sister, our mother, over a decade later when she was nine or ten, and I only know it because a couple of decades after that, when I was about eight myself, she told me a version of it and eventually our uncle also passed on his version. Not to Patch, just to me. Patch was too little and too sensitive at the time to hear this kind of story. But I am as thick skinned as boot leather as our mother used to say.
Anyway, this is what our great grandfather was said to have said.
The person of the best and highest qualities he ever knew in his life was a young man he met in the First World War.
This young man’s horse went blind, or one of the horses they had out there did, I don’t know now if it was his horse or it was just a horse that happened to be there.
It had been blinded by gas.
The gas had come down, pale yellow, and this type of gas blinded anything with eyes and if it settled on any open skin it burned itself into it. The men – the horses too – would turn a sort of orange colour with the burns the gas gave them and then they’d blister and the blisters it gave them could kill them. At this point in that war the men had masks, and gas masks of a sort for horses existed too but were scarce. This young man saw that the eyes of the horse had turned to eggwhite and he knew they’d have to shoot it, though the horse was otherwise fine, wasn’t burnt or blistered, just its eyes that were gone.
So he said to someone, I’m going to take that horse out of this since none of it is of its making.
Which he did.
Later that month they frogmarched him back, the young man, more a boy really; same as our great grandfather he’d probably have been nineteen, maybe twenty, early twenties at the most. Anyway they took him away and the authorities court-martialled him and a general who’d involved himself in the case declared an example should be made. So they did this by roping him to a post early one morning, blindfolding him and having a firing squad shoot him dead.
He’d gone over to the horse and unharnessed it, removed its bridle and let all the leather and metal fall to the ground. Then he’d taken off his own uniform jacket. That’s the first thing he did that wasn’t allowed. He’d dropped the jacket and its pouches, his gun and his bayonet belt etc on top of the muddy horse tack and he’d taken the horse – it had no bridle or rope on it so what he did was he put his hand to its forehead and took hold of its forelock – away from the place where the encampment was, off in the opposite direction of the noise of the fighting, wherever they were, I don’t know where they were, anyway there was woodland still standing somewhere nearby, trees on a patch of land not yet obliterated. He led the blind horse off towards that wood and the horse went with him, it went like a lamb our great grandfather apparently said, though it couldn’t see, and the man and the horse went in among the trees and vanished from view.
Afterwards someone told our great grandfather that the young man they shot had been a pit pony boy back in the day down in the mines with his father and his brothers till they’d enlisted.
Here’s another story, and it’s one that a random person we didn’t know and only ever met the once had also kept to herself for most of her life until she decided to tell us.
At least that’s what she said when she told us it.
And if that’s true, when she did decide to tell anybody, of all people it was two children complete strangers to her she chose to tell it to.
We were at a big family party, a silver wedding celebration for some relatives we didn’t know and also never met again held in a hotel in a town I only remember the name of because there was a model village there we were taken to see the next day where we marauded like small giants above the neatness of the streets, the peopleless cottages and miniature grand houses, the little trees and lawns, a church, another church, some more modern looking additions too like shops whose windows you could bend down and peek into and a sign above a door saying Chinese Restaurant.
At one point at this party someone had placed my sister and me in our matching pink dresses one on each side of a very elderly lady and taken a photograph. Then we were left sitting there with her while the grown ups, who’d crowded round to take photos of us and the lady, danced on the dancefloor to a small band up at the end of the room playing old songs, a song about magic moments, a song about anniversary waltzes; I was watching the people going back and fore in each other’s arms, even our mother and father were doing it. I’d never seen them dance together before, neither of us had; at home our mother could sometimes hardly walk as far as the end of the garden, but there she was, the same as everyone, smiling and dancing the old fashioned dance in among all the people.
Then I felt the lady we were sitting next to reach and take one of my hands.
I looked down at my hand in her very old looking hand then glanced across her lap as politely as I could at my sister. She was looking back at me in a panic because the very old lady we didn’t know had taken one of her hands too.
Copyright © 2026 by Ali Smith. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
