Times of War Collection

  We were in an alleyway. No one was about. I wanted us to run, but Mother said that would attract attention. So we walked out of the alley, and into the crowded streets of Kabul.

  With lots of other people about, I thought we were safe enough, but Mother said we’d be better off out of Kabul altogether, as far away from that man as we could get. We had no money for food, no money for a bus fare. So we started walking, Shadow leading the way again. We just followed her through the city streets, weaving our way through the bustle of people and traffic, too exhausted to care which way she was taking us. North, south, east or west, it really did not bother us. We were leaving danger behind us, and that was all that mattered.

  By the time it got dark, we were already well outside the city. The stars and the moon were out over the mountains, but it was a cold night, and we knew we’d have to find shelter soon.

  We had been trying to hitch a ride for hours, but nothing had stopped. Then we got lucky. A lorry was parked up ahead of us, at the side of the road. I knocked on the window of the cab and asked the driver if we could have a ride. He asked where we came from. When I told him we were from Bamiyan and we were going to England, he laughed, and told us he was from a village down the valley, that he was Hazara like us. He wasn’t going as far as England, only to Kandahar, but he was happy to take us if that would help. Mother said we would go wherever he was going, that we were hungry and tired, and just needed to rest.

  He turned out to be the kindest man we could have hoped to meet. He gave us water to drink and shared his supper with us. In the warm fug of his cab, we soon shivered the cold out of us. He asked us a few questions, mostly about Shadow. He said he had only once before seen a foreign-looking dog like that, with the American soldiers or the British, he wasn’t sure which.

  “They use dogs like this to find the roadside bombs, to sniff them out,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Those soldiers, the foreign soldiers, they all look much the same in their helmets, and some of them are so young. Just boys most of them, far from home, and too young to die.” After that he stopped talking, and just hummed along with the music on his radio. We were asleep before we knew it.

  I don’t know how many hours later, the driver woke us up. “Kandahar,” he said. He pointed out the way to the Iranian frontier on his map. “South and West. But you’ll need papers to get across. The Iranians are very strict. Have you got any papers? You haven’t, have you? Money?”

  “No,” Mother told him.

  “Papers I can’t help you with,” the driver said. “But I have a little money. It’s not much, but you are Hazara, you are like family, and your need is greater than mine.”

  Mother didn’t like to take it, but he insisted. So thanks to this stranger, we were at least able to eat, and to find a room to stay, while we worked out what to do and where to go next. I don’t know how much money the driver gave us, but I do know that by the time Mother had paid for the meal and the room for the night, there was very little left, enough only to buy us the bus fare out of town the next morning. But as it turned out, that didn’t get us very far.

  The bus that we had taken, that was supposed to take us all the way to the frontier, broke down out in the middle of the countryside. But it was now a countryside very different from the gentle valley of Bamiyan that I was used to. There were no orchards, no fields here, just desert and rocks, as far as you could see, so hot and dusty by day that you could hardly breathe; and cold at night, sometimes too cold to sleep.

  But there were always the stars. Father used to tell me you only had to try counting the stars, and you always went to sleep in the end. He was right most nights. Night or day we were always thirsty, always hungry. And the blister on my heel was getting a lot worse all the time, and was hurting me more and more.

  After walking for many days – I don’t know how many – we came at last to a small village, where we had a drink from the well, and rested for a bit while Mother bathed my foot. The people there stood at their doors and looked at us warily, almost as if we were from outer space.

  When Mother asked the way to the frontier, they shrugged and turned away. Again it was Shadow who seemed to interest them, not us, and she was doing what she always did, running around, exploring everywhere with her nose. As we left I saw that some of the children were following us, watching us from a distance. Just outside the village we saw a crossroads ahead of us. “Now what?” I asked Mother. “Which way?”

  That was when I noticed that Shadow had suddenly stopped. She was standing stock still at the crossroads, head down, staring at the ground at the side of the road. I called out to her, and she didn’t even turn round. I knew something was wrong right away.

  I looked behind me. The village children had stopped too, and one or two of them were pointing, not at Shadow, but at something further away, further down the road.

  I saw then what they had seen, foreign soldiers, several of them, coming slowly towards us. The one in front had a detector – I’d seen them before in Bamiyan, and I knew what they were for. He was sweeping the road ahead of him for bombs. I think it was only then that I put two and two together and realised what Shadow was doing. She had discovered a bomb. She was pointing to it. She was showing us. And I knew somehow that she was showing the soldiers too.

  But they still couldn’t see her. She was hidden from them by a boulder at the side of the road. So I just ran. I never even thought about it. I just ran, towards the soldiers, towards Shadow, towards the bomb.

  was running and running, waving at the soldiers to warn them, screaming and yelling at them that there was a bomb, pointing to where it was, to where Shadow was.

  All the soldiers had stopped by now, and were crouching down, taking aim at me.

  At that moment the whole world seemed to be standing still. I remember one of the soldiers standing up and shouting at me to stop where I was. I didn’t understand any English then, of course, but he was making it quite clear what he wanted me to do. He was telling me to move back, and to do it fast.

  So I did.

  I backed away till I found Mother’s arms around me, holding me. She was sobbing with terror, and it was only then that I began to be frightened myself, to realise at all how much danger we were in.

  The soldier was walking now towards Shadow, calling out one word over and over again, but not to us, to Shadow. “Polly? Polly? Polly?”

  Shadow turned, looked at him, wagged her tail just once, and then she was back to being a statue again, head down, nose pointing. Shadow never wagged her tail at anyone unless it was a friend. She knew this soldier, and he knew her.

  They were old friends. They had to be.

  But how? I couldn’t work it out at all. It was a weird moment. I knew the bomb might go off any time, but all I could think about was how that soldier and Shadow could possibly have known one another.

  The soldier was still shouting at us to move further away, then waving at us to get down. Mother was pulling me backwards all the time, almost dragging me, until I found myself lying down with her in the bottom of a ditch. Her arm was tight around me, her hand on top of my head, holding me down.

  “Don’t move, Aman,” she whispered in my ear. “Don’t move.” All the time we were lying there she did not stop praying.

  I don’t know how long we were lying there in the ditch, only that I was wet through, and that my foot was throbbing with pain. All the time I wanted to get up on my knees and have a look at what was going on, but Mother wouldn’t let me.

  We could hear the soldiers talking, but had no idea what was happening until we heard footsteps coming towards us along the road. We looked up to see two soldiers standing over us, one of them a foreigner, one in an Afghan uniform. Shadow was there too, panting hard, and looking very pleased with herself. The two soldiers helped us up out of the ditch, and Shadow jumped up and down at us, greeting us as if she hadn’t seen us for a month.

  “It’s all right,” the Afghan soldier told us. “The bomb is safe
now.” He spoke in Pashto, but then at once repeated it in Dari. He seemed to know almost immediately that we were Hazara, that we spoke Dari.

  The foreign soldier was shaking Mother’s hand, then mine, and he was talking excitedly all the time, the Afghan soldier interpreting for him. “This is Sergeant Brodie. He’s with the British army. He says you were very brave to do what you did. You may have saved many lives today, and he wants to thank you. He wants to tell you something else too, about the dog. He couldn’t believe his eyes when he first saw this dog, none of us could. He knew it was Polly at once. We all did. I knew it too. There’s no other dog in the world like Polly. He says that Polly was always excited like this after she discovered a bomb. It’s because she knows she has done her job well, and it makes her really happy. But Sergeant Brodie wants to know, how come she seems to know you so well?”

  “Of course she knows me,” I told them. “She’s our dog, isn’t she?”

  They looked at one another, not seeming to understand what I was telling them.

  “Your dog?” the British soldier asked me, through the interpreter again. “I’m still trying to work this out. I mean, how long have you had her? Where did you find her?”

  “Bamiyan,” I said. “She came to our home. It was months ago, nearly a year maybe.”

  “Bamiyan?” The interpreter was amazed. They both were. “Sergeant Brodie says that is impossible,” said the Afghan soldier. “Bamiyan is hundreds of miles away, up north. This whole thing is impossible.”

  As the interpreter was talking, the soldier seemed suddenly to be looking about him nervously. “Sergeant Brodie says we can’t stand here chatting out in the open,” the interpreter went on. “The Taliban could be watching us. They have eyes everywhere. They have ambushed us on this road before. But he has to find out more about all this, about you and Polly. We must go into the village, he says. We can be safer there.”

  So with Sergeant Brodie holding my hand, the soldiers behind us, and Shadow running on ahead, showing us the way as usual, we walked back into the village, the village children all around us.

  o that’s how we all found ourselves a few minutes later sitting inside a house in the village, changed into dry clothes the villagers had found for Mother and me, and sipping glasses of tea, with the whole room crowded with people, villagers and soldiers, the interpreter and this Sergeant Brodie, all of them listening, as I told them about how Shadow had wandered into our cave all those months before, more than a year ago, and how she’d been hurt in the leg somehow and was starving, how she’d got better, and that we were now on our way to England to live in Manchester, with my Uncle Mir, who had once shaken hands with David Beckham.

  The soldiers laughed at that. It turned out that one or two of them supported Manchester United, and that David Beckham was their hero too. So I knew then I was amongst friends.

  All this time Shadow lay beside me, her head on my feet, eyeing everyone in the room.

  When I had finished, Sergeant Brodie was the first to say anything. He spoke through his interpreter again.

  “The sergeant says he’s got something to tell you about this dog,” he began. The interpreter spoke Dari with an accent I wasn’t used to, but Mother and I understood enough. “He says you’re going to find it difficult to believe this. He finds it difficult to believe it himself, but it really is true. He’s asked all the soldiers who were here a year or so ago, and they all agree. There is no doubt about it. We all know this dog. That dog, she is called Polly, and she’s sniffed out more roadside bombs – the army calls them IEDs, Improvised Explosive Devices – than any other dog in the whole army. Seventy-five. Today was the seventy-sixth. And that dog disappeared, the sergeant says, about fourteen months ago now. He was there when it happened. And so was I.

  “We were out on patrol, just like today. Sergeant Brodie was with us on that patrol too. He was Polly’s handler. Polly lived with him and his family when they were back home in England. The sergeant was the one who trained her up, looked after her and lived with her on the base. The best sniffer dog he’d ever known, he says. Everyone said so. Anyway, there we were, out on patrol, Sergeant Brodie and Polly going on ahead of us, checking the roadsides for bombs as usual. When we saw Polly was on to something, we all stopped. And that’s when the Taliban ambushed us.

  “The fire-fight that followed went on for an hour or so, and when it was over we found we had one man wounded, Corporal Banford it was, and Polly wasn’t there. She was nowhere to be seen. She had disappeared. We called her and we called her, but we couldn’t hang about looking for her. It was too dangerous.

  “We brought in a helicopter to get Corporal Banford out of there, and off to hospital as quick as we could. Sadly, it wasn’t quick enough. He died on the way to hospital. We came back to look for Polly the next day, and told every patrol that went out after that to keep an eye out for her. But no one ever saw her again. So we all thought she’d been killed. We’d lost two soldiers that day. That’s how we thought of her, as one of us.”

  The interpreter had to wait a few moments for the sergeant to begin again.

  “Sergeant Brodie is saying,” he went on, “that the Taliban target our sniffer dogs if they can – they know how valuable they are to us, how many soldiers’ lives they save. That’s what he thought had happened to her. That’s what everyone thought. We put up a little memorial for her back at the base. Then, we come out here today, fourteen months later, and there you are waving us down to warn us, and there she is sniffing out a bomb just like she was when we last saw her. It’s incredible. And if I’ve understood it right, that dog wandered hundreds of miles north before she found you in Bamiyan, and then hundreds of miles back. I know it sounds silly, but I reckon she knew where she was going. She had to find someone to look after her, and that was you, and then she knew she had to come back where she belonged. Somehow she must have known the way home, sort of like a swallow does.”

  When he told me that last bit about Shadow knowing the way home, I was sure he had to be right. Wherever we had been since we left Bamiyan, Shadow always seemed to know the way to go. It was us, Mother and me, who had followed her, not the other way around. And so much else was making sense to me now, how Shadow was always running on ahead of us, nose to the ground, sniffing the roadside. This was what she’d been trained to do. She was an army sniffer dog, just like that driver in the lorry had told us.

  “Believe me, when they hear about this back at base,” the interpreter said, “the sergeant says you are going to be quite a hero for our lads. After all, it was you who warned us about the bomb. And it was you who rescued Polly, looked after her, and brought her back to us. They are going to be ‘over the moon’, as they say in English – and so is his daughter back home in England. She loved that dog to bits. The whole family did, the sergeant himself most of all. Yes, you’re going to be quite a hero.”

  s we set off again, Sergeant Brodie saw that I was limping, and Mother told him through the interpreter about my bad foot. So I got a lift, a piggy-back ride on Sergeant Brodie’s back, all the way to the base. No one had done that for me since Father died. It felt so good.

  And the sergeant was right. At the base, they did make a real fuss of me, of all of us, particularly Shadow. Nothing was too much trouble. We slept in a warm bed, ate all we wanted, had a shower whenever we liked. And they had a doctor there too who had a look at my blister. She said it was infected, that I’d have to stay on the base for a while, and not walk on it, not until it had healed up. They even let Mother telephone Uncle Mir in England.

  So Mother and Shadow and me, we stayed there on the base – it must have been for nearly a week, I think. They gave us a little room of our own and Mother slept a lot, and when my foot was better I played football with the soldiers.

  That was when I first learned to play Monopoly too. It was Sergeant Brodie who taught me. I learned to say my first words in English, and he learned some Dari too. Sergeant Brodie and me and Shadow, we’d spend a lot
of time together, when he wasn’t busy, when he wasn’t out on patrol. Like all the other soldiers, he kept wanting to take photos of Shadow and me to send home on his phone.

  Once, he showed me a live video of his daughter and his wife, taken on their phone. They were waving at me all the way from England, and shouting thank you to me for saving Polly. I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. There was something that was troubling me. And it was troubling Shadow too, I could tell.

  I knew by now we’d have to be leaving soon, as soon as my heel was better, and somehow she seemed to know it too. As the days went by Shadow wanted more and more to stay with us. But I could see she loved being with the soldiers too, particularly with Sergeant Brodie. He had even kept her favourite ball to remember her, the one she’d always liked to play with. The soldiers would throw it for her, and she’d chase it right across the compound, bringing it back, but not letting it go, till she was given something to eat in return.

  But she never played with them for too long. Always she came back to sit near me, and I’d catch her looking at me, and we’d both know what it was we were thinking. Is she Polly? Is she Shadow? Would she be coming with us when we left?

  I knew the answer. She knew the answer. I think we both kept hoping that both of us were wrong. I could feel she was becoming theirs again, an army dog, Sergeant Brodie’s dog. Polly, not Shadow. She still slept with us in our room, often came to lie down beside me with her head on my foot. I still hoped she would be coming with us, but I knew already deep down that it wasn’t going to happen, that she would be staying on the base with the soldiers, that she was back with Sergeant Brodie where she belonged.

  She knew it too, and was as sad about it as I was, and as Mother was too – she often told me later that she could never have imagined that she could become so fond of a dog.