The Reunion

Sogmarsh Wireless Presents — being thirty minutes of the good old days, as they never quite were.

The Hand and Reed, an hour before opening. Chairs down, a fire not yet drawing. Rain, of course.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless presents The Reunion; in which Mr Horace P. Dudgeon, President for Life of No. 4½ Sump Lane, gathers the old company of the Drudgeford Volunteers, and discovers that the past has, like everything else in this realm, been carried forward and gone off a little in the keeping.

Interior. The Hand and Reed. HORACE, sentimental, arranging chairs in a place of honour. MERCY sweeps.

HORACE. Tonight, Mercy, the old company reassembles. The Drudgeford Volunteers. Comrades-in-arms, forged in a shared —

MERCY. You never fought anyone, Horace. The Volunteers drilled on the green for thirty years and the war never came.

HORACE. (loftily) We stood ready, Mercy. Readiness is its own campaign. Captain Quail always said so. There is no bond like the bond of men who were, at all times, just about to be heroes. (sighs happily) Tonight we remember the glory.

MERCY. Tonight you remember standing in a field in the rain being shouted at by Ned Bellowcombe.

HORACE. (not hearing) The glory.

SFX: the door. Enter, one by one, the old company. OLD RUDGE, deaf and vague. A retired man, GRIMSHAW, who remembers everything wrong. And SOL, who was never in it but smells free ale.

HORACE. (rising, arms wide) COMRADES! The company reforms! Rudge! You remember the great days!

RUDGE. (cupping ear) Eh? Is it the bus?

HORACE. The great DAYS, Rudge! The Volunteers!

RUDGE. Oh, ah. The volunteers. (pause) Never volunteered for nothing in my life. Wife did it. Signed me up to get me out the house. (sits) Cold in that field. Is there soup?

HORACE. (pressing on, to GRIMSHAW) Grimshaw! Now here's a man who recalls it! The day we held the line at the mill — shoulder to shoulder — you remember!

GRIMSHAW. (warmly) Course I do. Clear as yesterday. You fell in the millpond.

HORACE. I — that is not — there was a tactical —

GRIMSHAW. Straight in. Full kit. Captain Quail had to fish you out with the flag-pole. We laughed for a week. (fondly) Best day of the whole thirty years, that was. You going in the pond.

HORACE. (strangled) That is NOT how the line was held —

GRIMSHAW. There wasn't a line, Horace. There was a pond, and you, in it.

SOL. (comfortably, drinking Horace's ale) I heard about that. Everyone's heard about that. That's the famous bit.

HORACE. (wounded) I convened this reunion to honour our glory, and you have all remembered the same afternoon differently, and every version has me in a pond!

MERCY. (gently, wiping a table) That's memory, Horace. Nobody keeps the same past. Ask three old soldiers and you get four battles and a pond.

The fire draws. The old men settle. RUDGE has his soup. It is, despite everything, warm.

GRIMSHAW. (quieter, into his cup) ...Mind, they were good years. Nothing happened in the whole thirty. Not one shot. Just a field, and the rain, and us, being ready for a thing that never came. (pause) I've missed it, if I'm honest. Missed the standing about with you lot.

RUDGE. (unexpectedly clear) We were young in that field. That's what we're remembering. Not the war. There wasn't a war. We're remembering being young, in the rain, together, waiting for something. (sips) Nicest waiting I ever did.

A silence. Even HORACE is still.

HORACE. (softly, all the grandeur gone) ...We never were heroes, were we.

GRIMSHAW. No, boy. We were a few damp men in a field who turned up for each other, thirty years, for no reason, for no war. (raises cup) And if that in't worth a reunion I don't know what is.

HORACE. (rising, and for once his grandeur is aimed right) ...Then I give you the Drudgeford Volunteers. Who fought nothing, held nothing, and won nothing — (voice catching) — and never once, in thirty years of rain, left a man standing in that field alone. (beat) Even when he was in the pond.

ALL. (warmly) The pond!

RUDGE. (happily) Is it the bus?

Interior. The kitchen, later. MERCY. HORACE, mellow.

MERCY. Good reunion?

HORACE. (quietly) ...It was not the reunion I called for, Mercy. I called for glory and I got a pond and a soup and three old men. (pause) It was better. I shan't say so again, so mark it. It was better.

MERCY. (fond, flat) I'll not tell a soul. (beat) You did go in the pond, though.

HORACE. (with immense dignity) ...Tactically.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless has presented The Reunion. The Drudgeford Volunteers stand ready, as ever, for a war that has not come and, please God, will not. They meet again next year, to remember a field, and a pond, and each other. Mr Dudgeon held the line. From within the pond.

The fire. Rain. Slow fade.

— end —