“Certo. Inglese?”

“Si.”

Adam Fletcher pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow as the young lady behind the counter at the Poste e Telegrafi stepped off her small stool to reach one of the blank telegram forms behind her. She picked up one of the green slips, laid it out neatly in front of her and poised her pen ready to start.

“Questo i testo di telegramma?” she paused “What text of telegram? ”

Adam felt as if the air was being ripped from his lungs as she looked up at him and smiled. What would he say? He had it all worked out in his head before entering through the door, but like the air from his lungs, words were now rushing out of his head. He excused himself from the counter and sat on the tiny bench in the room, the heat overwhelming him. While his peers would be counting down their final days before retirement in the luxury of an oak carved office in London, Adam had spent the last three weeks on a hunt that had started on the coasts of Cornwall and had become a race against a decrepit sea-going boat and the European rail system.

He had only been two days behind the boat when he had arrived at the port of Lisbon in a post-revolutionary Portugal. Some expensive information bought here, had informed him that the boat Ta Metut would head first to Morroco to resupply and then would be proceeding to Gibraltar – which Adam had hoped would be where he would make his intercept. Seven days he had waited and the ship had indeed come into the port, but had not docked, the Captain having chosen instead to anchor in deep water and send a small lighter ashore for whatever business it had.

Information had been harder to come by on the ship’s next move. A Corsican Merchant Captain had told him that these Berber pirate ships normally kept away from the French Algerian coast and the most likely next stopping ports would either be Civitavecchia or Napoli in Italy. After that the boat would only land at obscure ports in Asia Minor where westerners were not welcomed. It would end its journey in Syria and from there its cargo would be taken deep into Arabia. This was something Adam could not allow to happen – Isabella, the daughter of his best friend of thirty years, was a part of that cargo.

Having arrived in Civitavecchia two days previously, he had instructed his business partner to wire him more funds; he had known he would have to have help if he was to have any chance of rescuing her. He had spent the first night scouting the most run-down looking bars and brothels around the dock, but to no avail. He had in his mind a romantic notion of finding a British crew he would be able to rally to his cause in the name of righteousness; reality would be much different.

Along the main dock front had been a brothel with a bar that stretched out along the quay. He had been drinking there, watching the clientele in the hope of finding that crew when he had felt a blunt object being pressed into his lower back. A voice had whispered “Lira, Lira”. Adam had slowly gone to reach for his money, but as he did the look of his friend the morning after Isabella was kidnapped appeared his mind. It was the look of a man who had lost everything and it filled him with rage.

He had then clenched his fist and unleashed a punch that belonged to man half his age and twice his size, sending the vagrant flying backwards. In an area in which fights were an hourly occurrence, he had been surprised to find himself surrounded in response by several of the other bar patrons who branded knives.

Adam had got into a boxing stance – if he was to have gone down it wouldn’t of been without a fight. The stand-off had been broken just as quickly as it had started when the brothel’s Madam had pushed her way through to the vagrant and started screaming at him Italian. She had then made Adam sit down and started to scream at him.

An ex-navy Dutch fisherman Pauel had helped translate. The youth who had tried to attack Adam had been her son, and she had berated the boy, not for robbing her clients, but for having had the daylights knocked out of him by a man who was old enough to be his grandfather. She had then demanded to know Adam’s story and so he then told it, not just to her but to the entire bar.

He had spoken of his friend having found love later in life, and had described how the man had lost his wife in childbirth; how he had brought up a beautiful daughter he doted; how the child had taught him to love the world again. He had told of their holiday in Cornwall when the Berber pirates had come in the middle of the night and kidnapped the fourteen-year-old girl. Adam had spoken of how he could not bear to look at his friend the next morning, then how he had for the last three weeks been trying to get to the boat.

By the time dawn had come, Adam had had all the assistance in place that he would need to take on the pirates, including the Madam’s son. Pauel had warned him that half of those who had taken his money in the promise of help would not turn up, but Adam had been sure that even half would be twice as much as he’d need. Pauel had also offered his boat and crew (for a price, of course) in case the chase needed to go further.

This had been four hours ago; Adam got to his feet and walked back over to the counter. The Ta Metut was due to arrive this evening.

“Signoria, erm, testo…” he watched as the young lady picked up the pen, he cleared his throat and continued ” H…O…P…E…”

“I say, what a marvelous cock!”

I was so pleased the Vicar had noticed on this splendid spring day. Last year he had seemed to be obsessed by Lady Watson’s tits, and if we’re being perfectly honest, we would have to admit to agreeing they were a most magnificent pair, and most worthy of the prestigious Best Birds award in the Kensington and Chelsea Annual Ornithology Show 1911. But this was 1912. A whole year had passed. A year in which I had spent a great deal of time preparing and nurturing my Spangling Green Cock.

It was by no means the biggest out there, but I told myself size was not everything. I had spent many hundreds of hours grooming it. In the four weeks leading up to the show, I had carried out a strict regimen of massaging and bathing it at least three times a day – sometimes even before breakfast. As the Vicar placed his hands around it, I hoped that this – this - could be my year.

“Quite fidgety, isn’t it? Sign of a good diet,” he said.

I felt a bead of sweat form on my brow as he paused, and let out a silent sigh of relief as he continued.

“Oh, hasn’t it got tiny legs?”

Why did he have to mention the legs? Like a crystal glass dropped onto a marble floor, I felt my confidence shatter. Last year Duchess Bloemfontein had put on such a staggering display of thigh that, whilst she did not win, it was the talk of the Kings Road for many months after. Sadly, the Spangling Green never has offered much to offer the eye in terms of its limbage. Oh, why hadn’t I choosen a good booby over my cock, which now seemed to shrink in the Vicar’s hands? I lowered my head.

“There’s just one small thing, my dear fellow…”

With my confidence shattered and his use of the word ‘small’, I felt an ice-cold razor rip through my dreams. “Here it comes,” I told myself, as I prepared myself for more woe. Why hadn’t I listened to Asquith when he’d told me the vicar was much more a Brown Trembler man than a cock man, and that even the humble Rough Face Shag was known to bring a smile to his face.

“I don’t quite know how to say this, but…”

Come on, get to it! Raise the cold steel of the gun and blast what hopes I have left. Just say that it’s too small. That Lady Watson’s Agile Tits and the Red Fluffy Back Tit Babblers of the previous year’s winner – Miss Emmerford – had both been big, plentiful and full of bounce. I should have taken more time in my selection. If I had been more patient I would have been standing here proudly, showing off a large Willy Wagtail.

“It’s just….”

Why do you torture me so? God, I ask thee to open the ground and swallow me up.

“The ornithology show was last week. This is the canine show.”

I had wondered why I was surrounded by bitches.

I have come to fear the nights in here as much as I fear the sound of artillery. It is bedlam when the lights go out and nightmares are relived. It always begins in the same way – the names of the fallen are screamed out, and too-late warnings are issued. Silence always follows, and then the sobbing begins. We cry for those we have lost, for the wounds we have endured, and for those we miss. I ask: Is this what it is like to be damned?

The day never seems to bring light and the air is thick with death. There is a brown stream of watery blood and mud which comes in from under the door, but I do not know if this is real or not. I spend my time peeling back the sounds; from the corridor I hear the people coming in and the bodies going out. In another ward I hear a man who is always weeping slowly, and past that the noise of engines as vehicles go back empty and come back full. The distant sound of explosions and gunfire remind me constantly where I am – Hell.

Of the seven I arrived with, three now lie in the morgue and a fourth has contracted tuberculosis. The other two I choose not to remember. I am not sure if they are still men. I am not even sure if I am. My skin feels metallic, my mouth tastes of mud, and my blood feels like acid. I scratch hard at my wounds so I can feel the pain.

The nurses, doctors and orderlies seem to float here, and I lay in my bed and worry that the monster which is grinding its way through the men out in the fields, will soon come for them. At night I hear them weep too, but each day they come back. They are braver than I.

I will not write to you about any of these things. Instead I will start my letter as I always do. I will ask how you and father are doing, how my younger brother is, and has he got in any more fights at school. I will then tell you how I am getting better and how I hope to be out of this place in four weeks. I will tell you how frustrated I am to not be at the front, and the sooner I’m back there fighting the better. I will then conclude on an amusing story or a comment about a pretty nurse, and sign off by saying how one day we will all be together again.

I will write this way, because I want you to be proud of me, to love me and to remember me. Without your loving thoughts in my mind, I would truly be damned.