Murdo's memory

Remembering Murdo — a short story

‘Carson, it’s Bill Suthers’.

Vera Joyce held the phone until her husband came into the hallway and took it from her. ‘Yes sergeant’.

‘The Marshalls again. Old Mrs West has just been in. He’s kicking the living daylights  out of her and the kids were crying in the street until your mum took them in, at which point he shouted she would be next and called her an interfering cow. Go and sort him out once and for all’ then added after a pause and with a hint of desperation in his voice, ‘Use a gun if you have to’.

The last remark was a figure of speech. Constable Joyce had never held a firearm in his life, but he got the message loud and clear. Vera heard none of the conversation, but guessed from the grim look on Carson’s face. ‘Murdo again’, then continued ‘Always you’.

Carson pulled down his top lip and clenched it between his teeth, then nodded. They both knew why, a neighbourhood thing. Murdo and Beth Marshall were the same age as themselves and they had all grown up together on the same small council estate in the shadow of the town’s gasworks, said to be ‘the largest in Europe’.

For six months while they were still teenagers Carson and Beth had dated, but she got tired of waiting and transferred her attentions to Murdo after a few gins in the snug at The Station Hotel. He was the kind of man who did not take ‘no’ as an answer, which is how Beth found herself pregnant just days before her nineteenth birthday. She told her mum who told her dad, who spoke to Murdo’s dad and both men spoke to the parish priest, who married them four weeks later.

By the time Beth was twenty-two she had three young daughters, Ellen, Mary and Hazel. Murdo liked to drink and expected his rights whenever and however he wanted, but after Hazel Beth decided enough was enough and began to fight back. That was when Murdo became violent and the beatings began. At first the street only listened, but when he followed her onto the street it became a different matter and the police had no choice but to become involved. Carson would separate them, warn Murdo off, even take him down to the police station where Sergeant Suthers would issue a caution.

It had been Carson’s bad luck to be off-duty and visiting his parents with Vera the first time it happened and it was his mum who prompted him. ‘He’s going to kill her one day mark my words. He needs stopping son’, so Carson did what he was told and his mum told the street matron, old Mrs West, who began going to the police station every time Murdo attacked Beth and the station sergeant got in the habit of sending Carson because he knew the Marshalls better than any other police officer.

When he arrived Murdo as kicking Beth’s lower back repeatedly and shouting ‘I’ll has yum any way I want, so get back in the house before I has yum in the street ye cow’. Carson ran at him from behind like a whippet drawing his truncheon as did and knocked him to the ground with one blow across the back of a knee, turned him onto his stomach, pulled his arms back and cuffed his wrists, bent down and pulled up Murdo’s head with one hand and showed him the truncheon with the other. ‘Now listen up Murdo, before I leave you I’m going to bring this up so hard between your legs you won’t be doing anything with that dick of yours for a week which isn’t painful. Understand’. Had Murdo been sober or not slightly concussed from the fall he would have understood, but all he did was groan, so Carson turned his attention to Beth, who now had old Mrs West supporting her. ‘Murdo won’t be back before tomorrow, not then if I get my way’. Beth muttered her thanks as she began to limp towards his mum’s house and her three young daughters. Carson’s mum gave a small wave and ran a finger across her throat and pointed at Murdo.

Ten minutes later Murdo was in the town’s police station with Carson beside him and Sergeant Suthers looking across the charge desk towards him. ‘I don’t want another caution sergeant, this time it’s attempted murder or... or Murdo here joins up in the morning. The Staffordshires are in the town square tomorrow recruiting. Ten years in the county prison or seven in the army’. The dazed look on Murdo’s face suggested that he was still too drunk to take in anything Carson had said. As he put Murdo into a cell for the night he kept his promise and left the drunk man on the floor clutching his groin.

The recruiting sergeant took Murdo off Carson and had him taken under escort to the regiment’s barracks in Stafford. Two days later war was declared by Mr. Chamberlain and Murdo disappeared from view. Carson and the whole street hoped he would come back a better, sober kind of man, but it was not to be, because ten months later Beth Marshall received a telegram telling her that Murdo had been fatally wounded whilst serving in North Africa. Beth was a wife glad to be a widow and she did not shed a single tear. Her heart thumped with relief at the news and she hugged her three daughters close.

News of Murdo’s death quickly spread around the town and as it did, so did a story that he killed ten Italians before he a German sniper shot him, added to which he was the first soldier from the town to die in the war. The town council began a roll of honour and Lance-corporal Murdo Marshall of the Staffordshire Regiment became its first name. It was 1947 before two hundred names were added to the town’s war memorial, by which time the story of how Murdo died had become fact and the only reason he did not get a Victoria Cross was because he was working class and from the poor Midlands industrial town.

Within minutes of Murdo’s death becoming news the co-op at the end of the street on which Beth lived began a impromptu collection which soon included other shops across the town. After a week £500 had been raised and given to Beth, at which point it was agreed a permanent fund for war widows should be established. No one else ever got as much as Beth, she was just lucky to be the first, and she thanked the town for its generosity by taking her three daughters to Barmouth in Wales to escape the bombing, where she bought a small cottage and within a year married a farmer called Idris, who Ellen, Mary and Hazel quickly called ‘Dad’. Beth never went back to the town, nor spoke to her daughters of life before Idris and died just before the new millennium dawned.

It took Hazel’s daughter Lucy to go in search of the past and to wonder why her nanna never spoke of where she came from. Her research led her back to a feted grandfather remembered as a hero with his portrait in the town’s museum and a road named after him. The story was much the same as it had been in 1947, one that Beth never knew or would have cared about. It was Vera Joyce, by chance the town museum’s volunteer archivist, who told Lucy about the life and times of Murdo Marshall. Going home she told her husband Carson about the young visitor and what she had told her, to which he replied ‘Fancy that’.

The police station had taken a direct hit in 1941 and all its records destroyed. Army records made no mention of where or how Murdo actually died, other than to say that he was killed in North Africa ‘behind enemy lines’. Only two people alive in 2002 knew the truth and with them it would die. Of such acts, memories are made.

Robert Howard

3 May 2016

1,366 words