Only Time Will Tell by Jeffrey Archer

Author:Jeffrey Archer [Archer, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781250039026
Amazon: 0312539568
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 2013-03-26T05:00:00+00:00

OLD JACK TAR

1925–1936

27

On a balmy Thursday afternoon in the Northern Transvaal, I killed eleven men, and a grateful nation awarded me the Victoria Cross for service above and beyond the call of duty. I haven’t had a peaceful night’s sleep since.

If I’d killed one Englishman in my homeland, a judge would have sentenced me to hang by the neck until I was dead. Instead, I have been sentenced to life imprisonment, because I still see the faces of those eleven wretched young men every day, like an image on a coin that never fades. I’ve often considered suicide, but that would be the coward’s way out.

In the citation, gazetted in The Times, it was stated that my actions had been responsible for saving the lives of two officers, five non-commissioned officers and seventeen private soldiers of the Royal Gloucesters. One of those officers, Lieutenant Walter Barrington, has made it possible for me to serve my sentence with some dignity.

Within weeks of the action I was shipped back to England, and a few months later I was honorably discharged following what would now be described as a mental breakdown. After six months in an army hospital, I was released back into the world. I changed my name, avoided my hometown of Wells in Somerset, and set off for Bristol. Unlike the prodigal son, I refused to travel a few miles into the next county where I would have been able to enjoy the tranquillity of my father’s home.

During the day, I would roam the streets of Bristol, rummaging around in dustbins for scraps, while at night my bedroom was a park, my resting place a bench, my blanket a newspaper, my morning call the first bird to announce a new dawn. When it was too cold or wet, I retreated to the waiting room of a local railway station, where I slept below the bench and rose before the first train shunted in the next morning. As the nights became longer, I signed up as a non-paying guest of the Salvation Army on Little George Street, where kind ladies supplied me with thick bread and thin soup before I fell asleep on a horse-hair mattress below a single blanket. Luxury.

As the years passed I hoped that my former companions-in-arms and brother officers would assume I was dead. I had no desire for them to find out that this was the prison I’d chosen to carry out my life sentence in. And it might have stayed thus, had a Rolls-Royce not screeched to a halt in the middle of the road. The back door swung open and out leaped a man I hadn’t seen for years.

“Captain Tarrant!” he cried as he advanced toward me. I looked away, hoping he’d think he’d made a mistake. But I remembered only too well that Walter Barrington was not a man who suffered from self-doubt. He grabbed me by the shoulders and stared at me for some time before he said, “How can this be possible,

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