‘Did you hear if war is declared?’ I asked her, trying to look very wise.
‘No,’ she said, staring at me as if I were mad. Then she began to rub one sandal against the other.
‘Are you liking the town school?’ she asked, looking at me aslant and half giggling.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. And then again. ‘It’s OK. We gamble with pennies,’ I added. ‘The school is ten times as big as the village school.’
Her eyes rounded with astonishment, but then she said, ‘I bet I wouldn’t like it.’
At that moment I looked up into the sky and saw a plane passing.
‘That’s an aeroplane,’ I said.
‘I bet you don’t know what kind it is,’ said Peggy.
I was angry that I didn’t know.
Suddenly Peggy dashed away at full speed shouting at the top of her voice, ‘Townie, townie, townie.’
I went back into the shop lest anyone should see me. I was mad and ashamed, especially as I had loved Peggy so much in the past.
When I got home my mother said that I had taken my time, hadn’t I? She began to talk about her brother who had been in a war in Egypt. ‘He was a sergeant,’ she said. ‘But this time,’ she continued, ‘all the young ones will be in the war.’
I thought of myself as a pilot swooping from the sky on a German plane, my machine gun stuttering. I was the leader of a squadron of aeroplanes, and after I had shot the enemy pilot down I waggled the wings of my plane in final salute. He and I were chivalrous foes, though we would never recognise each other of because of the goggles.
‘There’s Tormod who’ll have to go and Murchadh and Iain Beag.’ She reeled off a list of names. ‘There won’t be anyone left in the village except old men and old women. I was in the First World War myself, at the munitions. Peggy was with me, and one time she pulled the communication cord of the train,’ and she began to laugh, remembering it all, so that she suddenly looked very young and girlish instead of stern and unsmiling.
‘The ones here will all go to the navy,’ she said.
I hoped that the war wouldn’t stop before I was old enough to join the RAF, or perhaps the army.
When I had finished my tea I went out. Daial was waiting and we went and played a game of football. Daial was winning and I said that one of the goals he claimed he had scored shouldn’t be counted because the ball wasn’t over the line. We glared at each other and were about to fight when he said he wouldn’t count it after all. After we had stopped playing we began to wrestle and he had me pinned to the ground shouting, ‘Surrender.’ But I managed to roll away and then I had his arms locked and I was staring into his face while my legs rested on his stomach. Our two faces glared at each other, very close, so that I could see his reddening, and I could hear his breathing, Eventually I let him up and we ran a race, which he won.
I felt restless as if something was about to happen. It was as if the whole village was waiting for some frightening news. Now and again I would see two women talking earnestly together, their mouths going click, click, click.
I tried to do some homework but ships and planes came between me and my geometry. I was standing on the deck of a ship which was slowly capsizing, looking at the boats which were pulling away. Not far from me there was a German U-boat. I remained on the deck for I knew that a captain always went down with his ship. The U-boat commander saluted me and I saluted him back. The water began to climb over my sandals, and my teeth chattered with the cold. I knew that the rest of the British Navy would avenge my death and that my heroic resistance would appear in the story books.
I looked up and my mother was standing looking at me with an odd expression on her face. However, all she said was, ‘Get on with your lessons.’
‘You wait,’ I thought, ‘you will read about me someday. Your sergeant brother won’t be in it.’
I went out to the door, and saw Tinkan hammering a post into the ground. The hammer rose and fell and it looked as if he had been hammering for ever, his head bald as a stone bent down so that he didn’t see me. In the distance I heard someone whistling. Why had Peggy called me a townie: there was no reason for that. But I would show her. Some day she would hear that I had died bravely winning the Victoria Cross or perhaps the Distinguished Conduct Medal. She would regret calling me a townie and in fact she might even show some of our notes to the man who came to write about me. Displacing the adverts on the front page of the local paper would be massive headlines: ‘Local Hero Goes Down Fighting.’
I went over to the house next door and talked to Big Donald who as usual was wearing a blue jersey. He told me, ‘There’s no doubt of it. There will be a war in a day or two. No doubt of it,’ he said, spitting into the fire. The globs of tobacco spit sizzled for a moment and then died. ‘No doubt of it,’ he said. ‘And you’ll see this village bare.’
‘Thank God I don’t have to go,’ he said. ‘But if I had been younger . . . ’ and he made
