already halfway to the bedroom door. Was that cowardice on his part, or just self-preservation? I didn’t feel anger towards him; neither did I feel pity. Both facts surprised me, because it meant that deep down I still genuinely cared about him. Maybe becoming a father myself had changed the way I perceived Dad at an emotional level; or maybe I’d just mellowed with age. Cowardice or self-preservation? The older you get the harder life’s snowball questions become to handle.
He straightened up, reinvigorated by the ghost of a working man’s pride. ‘Come on. You’ll miss that train.’
‘Dad...’
He paused, staring at the door handle. ‘I told you. I’ll be fine.’
‘But if you need anything… anything at all - you only have to ask.’ By the time the lump in my throat hit my stomach it had become a rock. ‘I’m only on the end of the phone.’ And he at the other, dangling by its noose.
He seemed to contemplate this for several seconds, before concluding with a sigh: ‘I can cook and clean and wash my clothes. Do everything she did.’ But there’s more to a marriage than the sum of its parts, and it isn’t tasks that make a home, but people and the things they do together. This house was emptier and colder than it had ever been.
‘I’d do anything to see her again,’ he exclaimed, staring abruptly into my eyes. ‘Just to ask her about stuff and watch her bustle around that kitchen...’ He bit his lip.
‘Dad, please, you don’t have to…’
‘I mean… anything.’
And I saw with a jolt that he wasn’t staring into my eyes at all, but into the wardrobe. I turned and for a split second I could see her too, the lines around her eyes deepening as her care-worn face broke into a smile. I reached out for a blue dress and took hold of the sleeve as I had once grasped her hand as a toddler by the Pelican Crossing.
‘I miss her, too.’ I looked back at this hard-edged husk of a man and tried to see someone that meant something to me, a real human being, not just a figurehead.
‘I know you always liked her clothes,’ he gulped. ‘She… told me.’
I closed my eyes, thinking again of that sultry Saturday afternoon half a lifetime ago, and the clicking sound coming from the ground floor. There were no secrets in this house, only surprises.
I opened my eyes to see a slender hand hanging from the blue sleeve, barely recognising it as my own.
‘Maybe...’ His words were muffled as if by deep water.
‘Perhaps once a month,’ I muttered, my eyes beginning to sting agreeably. ‘I could cook tea for you, lay the table… Like the way Mum used to.’
‘For a couple of hours or so. Just to remind me – to remind us,’ he declared.
‘Like a home movie?’ I said, making light of his gravity.
‘Yes.’ He stared at the floor, struggling with the enormity of what we were planning, overwhelmed by its healing potential. ‘You… You don’t think it’s weird?’
I put the heaters back inside her wardrobe and gently closed the doors, though not for the last time. ‘No,’ I smiled, a familiar fire flowing through my veins. ‘Do you?’
Discharge of Duty
According to popular opinion people like me are either religious fanatics or cowards. That I was neither singled me out for particular prejudice. I could have used my parents’ standing as committed churchgoers to sit out the war, but my principles came from the heart not the hymn book.
‘Do you think God is a pacifist, our Ryan?’ my mother spat.
‘He’ll kill us both, eventually.’
Her shame of me was polymorphic, but I think my father harboured a secret admiration for my obduracy. Even when the house got bombed and the landlord told him they couldn’t expect any help with clearing up the damage seeing that his son was yellow made us closer.
‘I’d go for you if they’d let me,’ he told me once. And since he’d fought in the 1914-18 war I had no grounds to doubt his sincerity.
‘I have to do this,’ I replied, and braced myself for the consequences.
Having registered as a conscientious objector at the Employment Exchange, I then faced a tribunal chaired by a county court judge oddly deposed of his robes.
‘What would you do if a German tried to assault your sister?’ I was an only child but fortunately the question was metaphorical. ‘If everyone took your stance Hitler would be here by tomorrow.’
‘If everyone took my stance Hitler wouldn’t have an army.’
I felt like I was being tried for a crime I was trying desperately not to commit. Kafka would have loved it. They gave me the worst possible option: a non-combatant role in the regular army. That way the whole world could see my only reason for not fighting was spinelessness.
I was arrested by the local bobby and loaded into the back of a lorry. My mother wept at her own humiliation. My father was too afraid he might try to save me to watch. There were three others with me, one of whom – a genuine coward, if you ask me – blubbered like a toddler the whole journey.
When we got to the camp we had to report to the guard room as ‘rookies’. I was given a uniform and various essential pieces of kit, including a gas mask and a rifle. I tried to decline the latter as politely as I could.
‘Every soldier has a rifle,’ a voice bellowed from behind me, ‘regardless of whether he has the guts to fire it. Move along.’
They were perhaps the only civil words he ever had for me. Sergeant Rogers was an ex-boxer whose brother had been an early casualty of war. He was bitter and heart-broken. I think he saw his brother every time he saw me. Sometimes he reacted like it was me that had pulled the trigger. By the end of the week he’d almost convinced me I had.
They kept us in civilian clothing for a couple of days, while we got fit on an assault course. Then they started drilling us on the parade ground. I felt like my principles were being eroded, as if they were trying to trick me into being a soldier. I stopped cooperating, just standing motionless as the rest of the boys marched around me in step, their boots resounding like a slow hand clap.
Lance Corporal Evans made me run round the perimeter fence twelve times with my hands clasped behind my head. The next morning I had to complete the route march twice. When I got back to the camp the mess was shut. I refused to even approach the parade ground in the afternoon and subsequently had to run the perimeter twelve times on an empty stomach. I thought of refusing that too, but then it wasn’t physical fitness I was objecting to. Lance Corporal Evans hurled abuse at me for most of the ordeal. His use of metaphor in relation to bodily organs and function convinced me he had a promising future in surgery after the war.
Day four – a real scorcher - was the crucial one, however: I refused to wear the uniform.
‘Put your uniform on, you worthless excuse for a soldier,’ the sergeant bellowed, deliberately spitting in my face with every syllable. I was powerless to retaliate: my own mouth had gone dry. Sergeant Rogers had a voice like a tyre iron: it didn’t matter how much you resisted it could always find a way to prize open your nervous system.
‘But I’m not a soldier. I’m a conscientious objector,’ I managed to stutter.
‘I’ll tell you what you are,’ he roared, his cheeks glowing pink in the manner of someone suffering in the throes of some awful tropical fever. The details of his tirade I leave to the imagination, although one of the things he accused me of was physically impossible. When Rogers screamed at me to put my uniform on I felt he was screaming at the world for having taken his brother away. As a compromise I stripped naked and tried not to flinch as his whole head went crimson.
‘Outside, traitor. Left, right! Left, right! Left, right!’
He marched me out into the middle of the parade ground, pushing and shoving when I tried to resist, stark naked and carrying the sacred khaki uniform with arms extended. ‘Stand to attention, head up, eyes front.’ He called over Lance Corporal Evans and told him to add another uniform to my pile every hour.
When he came back at two o’clock for another screaming se
ssion I already had six sets of uniform in my outstretched arms and sunburn all down my back. I straightened my spine and wondered if my mother would applaud the treatment I was receiving. I couldn’t believe that her shame could get the better of her maternal bonds, but then again there was a war on.
By eight o’clock it was getting dusk. A Private Williams put the thirteenth uniform on top of my pile. It covered my face, which at least kept that part of my anatomy warm. The rest of me was in big trouble. I couldn’t feel my feet, my calf and bicep muscles felt like they were on fire and I doubted I’d be able to lay on my back for the rest of that month. My buttocks were numb with cold and my bladder felt like a bag of nails. As for the more vulnerable parts of male anatomy the chances of my passing down my coward’s genes had been significantly reduced.
‘If you ask me, old Rogers has got a screw loose,’ Private Williams whispered. ‘You should pretend to pass out.’ But that would have been cowardice.
Bang on eight-thirty, with long shadows falling like trees, I heard Sergeant Rogers screaming his way towards me. By now my bladder was fit to burst and it was probable I might pass out genuinely.
I staggered when he knocked off the top half of the pile and was surprised to see the parade ground filled with the entire barracks’ population. Sergeant Rogers was going to make an example of me.
He launched into another vitriolic diatribe up close and personal. His saliva on my lips was the only