The big man, with his large red face, moustache cut close (trimmed every day), short grey hair neatly parted (cut weekly by his wife), his big blue eyes that were usually abstracted, as if concentrated on keeping his thoughts in their place, now focused fully on his son, and he was certainly taking him in, judging.
‘Politics is a mug’s game. You’ll find that out for yourself.’ And he returned to the business of loading his fork with beef.
‘James is only finding things out for himself, dear,’ said Mrs Reid, as always conciliatory, surely too much so, as much as would justify a secret fear her husband would one of these days explode and demolish her and everything in their life.
‘That’s what I said, wasn’t it?’ said Mr Reid, presenting an angry face to her, and then to James, chin forward: he might have been expecting a punch on it, ‘Crooks and thieves and liars.’
This was a tierce choking cry, in a voice the son did not remember ever hearing. Had his mother? He saw her lower her eyes, play with a bit of bread on the tablecloth, then knead it with her knuckles.
James thought: this has been going on all my childhood, and I never noticed. And now it was the pain he felt for both of them that took him out of the house, as much as his fascination with this brave new world of politics and literature.
Donald was lending him books which he was reading as if literature were food and he was starving. The books were in a pile on the hall table. He would take one up to his room to read, then return it to its place and choose another. He saw his mother stand by the books, then open one. Spender,
“‘I think continually of those who were truly great”,’ he said, sharing with her something of the richness he had discovered; and he thought that this was the first time he had let her in to his private self. She nodded, smiling. ‘I like that,’ she said. There were books in a bookshelf, but he did not remember her reading them. They were mostly war books, and that was the reason he had not touched them. They were his father’s and shared with him the aura of Don’t Touch.
Now his mother said, ‘I saw a host of golden daffodils, fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” I learned that at school.’
He said, lowering his voice - his father was in the room next door -‘“It seemed that out of battle I escaped”. And she looked over her shoulder, and said, in a whisper, ‘No, don’t, don’t, he wouldn’t …’ And she walked quickly away.
When his father had gone to the pub and his mother was upstairs, James knelt by the bookcase and pulled out the books one by one. All Quiet on the Western Front. And Quiet Flows the Don. The Battle of the Somme. Passcliendale. Goodbye to All That. An Old Soldier Remembers. If They Should Die … They Should Ask Us …Three shelves full.
In spring I939 James was called up, with the young men in the age group 20 to 2I. His father said, ‘That’s right, that’s what young men are for,’ And he got to his feet with emphasis and went to the pub.
Donald had been called up, and when James went to visit he found that boisterous house clamorous with argument, even more than usual. The two older brothers assumed they would be next. The girls were in tears because their boyfriends were in the same age group as Donald and James.
‘There can’t possibly be a war, it would be too terrible,’ said the pacifist mother, and one daughter. ‘We have to stop Hitler,’ said the father and sons and the other daughter. These were the points of view to be heard on the wireless, in the newspapers, exchanged everywhere. ‘With the weapons there are now, no one could be stupid enough to go to war.’
The two young men actually about to be shovelled into the army, smiled a lot and went off together to a debate in the nearby town: ‘Is It too Late for Peace?’ Donald spoke passionately from the floor that Hitler must be stopped now, otherwise we would all be slaves. A woman in the audience stood up to say that her fiance and two brothers had been killed in the last war, and if the young ones present knew what war was like they would be pacifists like her. A man of her age, that is to say one presumably schooled in war, asked her sarcastically if she believed her fiance and brothers would have liked the idea of living like slaves under Hitler, and she shouted at him, ‘Yes, yes. Better alive than dead.’ An old woman said that it was time they remembered the white feathers that were handed out to cowards in the last war: that was how she felt. The arguments grew so loud and bitter the platform bad to call for order, and then ask the ushers to escort out a youth who said the white-feather woman should be shot, she was disgusting.
His father told James, ‘They’re going to lick you into shape. That’s what they call it. They’ll make a man of you. You get yourself made an officer. You’ll have it easier that way. You’ll be officer material, with your education.’
James and Donald went together to the call-up centre in Reading. James had run and played cricket and football for the school, and expected to be told that he was a hundred per cent fit. He was, with the proviso that he must watch out for an old football injury, a torn ligament in his knee, which now could be seen as a thin white scar. Donald was told he was overweight, but the army would cure him of that. All day they were in a large hall, in a mill of sweaty, smelly young men, many from homes that had no bathroom. All the same age: Donald joked that they had reached the age for the slaughterhouse, like lambs or calves. He sounded cheerful about it. The same age, but far from the same shape. Many were thin, and most were short: Donald and James were taller, and their bones were well-covered. Their assiduous attention to the facts of British life had taught them that the working classes subsisted on bread and margarine sprinkled with sugar, and bread and dripping, with cups of very strong tea, full of sugar. ‘Sugar is food.’ Here were the results, these pallid, undersized men. Some were being discarded because they had rickets, many sent to the dentist because of rotting teeth.
Plans were made for another visit to Donald’s, but the summons came first. The war was boiling up while people still talked pacifism, it heated debates and the contents of the News, it seethed in people’s veins and in their minds, and it ejected James and Donald out from ordinary life into camp.
James spread his uniform on his bed, and fitted bits of it to himself. His room, usually a quiet, unassertive place, was littered with martial reminders in khaki.
James was a tall, slim young man, quick and alert, everything about him fine and nervy. He had a thin nose, a long curved beautiful mouth, too often made narrow with the tension of determination. His eyes were long, a luminous blue, and his hair was a pale shining brown. His brows were delicate, glistening. He had about him the sleekness of a healthy animal. But when he at last had got the uniform on himself, he was made dull and awkward. He looked at himself in the long mirror on the landing and thought that the girl at the Socialists for Justice Summer School who had said, but you’re lovely, you’re like a film star,’ would not say that to him now. He went downstairs, saw his mother sitting under the lamp, with a magazine, the radio jiggling dance music. She glanced up, and her hand flew to her mouth and she said in a gasp, ‘Oh, no.’ Then she stood up, all apology, and said, ‘Darling, you look very nice, it was the shock, that’s all.’ And she tried to embrace this soldier, but the thickness of the cloth he was inside absorbed the embrace, negated it.
