Feelings of Fear (12 page)

Jack was still reading when Thomson and Patel and two or three more of the First XI noisily pushed their way into the dormitory. Thomson was the captain and Jack always tried to stay out of his way, because he was always shoving, punching and bullying.

He sat down heavily on the end of Jack's bed. “We've decided to put you on trial for losing us the game against Johnson House and for being a pathetic little creep.”

“A
girl
could have stopped that last ball,” added Patel.

“I just couldn't reach it,” said Jack.

“Well, we could see that, and that's why the court has decided to have mercy on you. Because you're such a pathetic little creep, we're
going to build you up. We're going to give you breakfast in bed every single day, starting from now.”

With that, another member of the team produced a large box of cornflakes from behind his back. Thomson pushed Jack on to the floor and dragged down the duvet. He emptied the whole box of cornflakes all over Jack's sheet, and then Patel took a carton of milk out of his pocket and poured it everywhere. Another boy shook sugar over the top, and yet another produced a jar of marmalade and smeared it across Jack's pillow.

“There you are, wimp,” said Thomson. “A nice nourishing breakfast for a weedy little wimp.”

Jack got up off the floor. He was trying not to cry but it wasn't easy.

Thomson said, “And here's a warning, too. Mr Brabham has gone stark staring mad and picked you for next Wednesday's game against Villiers. If we lose that game, you won't need breakfast in bed anymore because you'll be dead and buried.”

Mr Brabham was sitting at his desk marking exam papers. He was a young man who always wore a tweedy jacket and whose hair always stuck up at the back.

Jack knocked at the door and waited. Eventually Mr Brabham looked up and said, “Ah, Matthews. What can I do for you?”

“Actually sir it's next Wednesday's game against Villiers, sir.”

“What about it?”

“I don't want to play in goal sir.”

“Oh. So what position do you want to play? You're not much of a runner so I don't want to put you out on the wing.”

“I don't want to play at all sir.”

Mr Brabham put down his pen and sat back. “Is that because of what happened yesterday?”

“Sort of.”

“I thought it might be. But the fact is that I don't really have anybody else except you. And there's something else besides. I think that everybody should be given a chance to show that they can put things right. Next Wednesday's game is your chance. If you don't play, everybody will think that you're a coward. If you do, and we
win, then Thomson and all his cronies will forget about yesterday, and they'll be calling you a hero.”

“Yes sir.”

“Here it is,” said the club secretary, as they reached the second-to-last photograph on the wall. “Whetstone FC, 1912-1913 Season.” He peered at it more closely, and then took out his pen and pointed at a tall, good-looking man with a small moustache and hair parted in the middle. “That's your man. Bertram Matthews. One of the best goalkeepers we ever had, according to the records. What's your interest in him?”

Jack found himself staring at the man who had walked across No Man's Land in 1915 singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Well,
half
of it, anyway.

“He was my great-grandfather's brother. I'm trying to find out how he got killed in the war.”

“Killed, was he? Poor chaps, look at them. Most of them were. The best thing you can do is go to the Imperial War Museum, or maybe the Public Records Office. I was reading the other day that they've started to release a lot of secret Army papers from the First World War. Might be worth a look, mightn't it?”

“Yes. Thank you, I'll try it.”

Together they walked back along the dark panelled corridor. “So you're a Matthews, too?” the club secretary asked him. “I'll bet you're a great goalie, too. Runs in families, skill with a ball. Inherited. You'll have to come and see us when you're older.”

“Yes,” said Jack, although he didn't mean it.

He forged a letter from his grandfather, saying that he wanted to take him to a race meeting at Kempton Park. Mr Toffy, his housemaster, was mad keen on horse-racing, so he waved his hand and gave Jack permission to go without even reading it. Jack took a train to London and then the tube to the Public Records Office at Kew, where he spent most of the gloomy Saturday morning searching through books, papers and photographs. He had made himself some peanut-butter sandwiches, and he snatched quick bites out of them when nobody was looking.

He came across great-uncle Bertie's name quite unexpectedly, in a file on desertion, acts of cowardice and summary execution. During the war, over three hundred British soldiers had been shot at dawn for refusing to fight, or dropping their weapons and running away from the front line.

And here it was: “Report by Captain T.C. Watson, of the London Regiment, on the summary execution of Pte B.R. Matthews, December 25, 1915, by Second-Lieutenant W.W. Pearson.”

Second-Lieutenant Pearson had been warned by his superior officers that he needed to keep an eye on great-uncle Bertie because he was “a threat to general morale … a coward and a waverer.” He had seen great-uncle Bertie “defecting to the Hun in the full sight of the entire platoon,” He had shouted a warning, and when the warning was ignored “I felled him with a single shot.”

But Captain Watson had also talked to other eye-witnesses. Because it was beginning to snow, most of them hadn't noticed great-uncle Bertie until he was twenty or thirty metres into No Man's Land. But Pte H. Rudd had been standing next to him before he climbed out of the trench.

“It was very silent. The snow was falling and there was no gunfire. Pte Matthews suddenly said to me, ‘Listen. I can hear somebody calling.' I listened and sure enough I could hear somebody shouting out for help, in English. Pte Matthews said, ‘I'm going to go over the top and find him. He's probably wounded, or trapped in a shell-hole. He can't spend Christmas Day freezing to death.'

“He made himself a white flag. I said he was mad, and that he would only end up getting himself shot by a German sniper. He said that instead of calling out he would sing a carol as a way of finding his man, and then the Germans would think that he was just trying to show them some Christmas goodwill.

“I couldn't make him see that what he was doing was folly. He said, That's somebody's son out there, Rudd,' and up the ladder he climbed and off he went.

“I heard him sing the first line of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem' and then listen – and, sure enough, the second line came back from far away. He sang the second line, and waited, and the third line came
back. It was then however that I heard Second-Lt Pearson challenge him to stop; and then the shot was fired.

“I tried to protest and to tell Second-Lt Pearson that there was a wounded man out there, but Second-Lt Pearson would have none of it and in the mood he was in I thought it wiser not to argue with him. Besides, his shot had started off a heavy exchange of rifle-fire with the enemy and there was no chance of saving the poor beggar after that.

“There was a heavy artillery bombardment the next morning at dawn and the body of Pte Matthews was never recovered, neither was that of the fellow he tried to save.”

At the end of his report, Captain Watson had written: “I recommend that this evidence be kept secret. It would do no good to have a man of Pte Matthews' opinions made into a national hero; nor to suggest that the British Army is in the habit of shooting its own heroes in the back.”

So that was what had happened. Great-uncle Bertie hadn't been a deserter at all. He had risked his life to rescue a man he didn't even know.

Jack made a photocopy of the evidence. The librarian said, “Serious subject for a young chap like you, isn't it?”

Jack said,
“Very
serious.”

That weekend, he wrote a report all about great-uncle Bertie. He made copies of it and sent them to all the television news companies and all the national papers – as well as the local paper to which great-uncle Bertie had written, all those years ago.

At break on Tuesday morning, Mr Toffy came across the yard and said, “Matthews, you'd better come inside. Some reporters want to talk to you.”

For a day, Jack was famous. On Wednesday his picture was in almost every newspaper, alongside great-uncle Bertie's, underneath the headlines “Great War Coward Was Hero After All” and “Great-Nephew Clears Local Footballer's Name.”

But just before lunch Thomson came up and pushed Jack in the back. “Think you're some kind of celebrity, do you, you creep? You will be this afternoon, when I kill you for losing the game against Villiers.”

*      *      *

Out on the football field, it was starting to snow. Jack's grandfather was standing on the touchline in a hat and a scarf and a thick brown tweed coat.

“That was a very fine thing you did for great-uncle Bertie,” he told Jack. “I only wish his parents could have known what a hero he was.”

“Hurry up, Matthews, you worm!” called out Patel. “The sooner we lose this game the sooner we can all go home!”

Villiers were a fit, quick, well-trained team. Their sports master was an ex-Army gym instructor who jogged and bounced up and down the touchline screaming at his forwards until he was red in the face – not like Mr Brabham, who stood under his snow-laden umbrella calling out, “Come on, Barrons!” from time to time, sucking throat-sweets, and coughing.

No matter how much he disliked them, Jack could see that Thomson and Patel were playing their best. As the snow whirled thicker and thicker, they kept the ball in the Villiers half for most of the first half-hour, and in the twenty-third minute Patel scored a cracking goal from a cross by Woods.

A minute before half-time, however, the Villiers forwards came weaving through the Barrons defence and left them all wrong-footed. Jack crouched ready in the goal-mouth with the snow blowing against his face. A small black boy came running up to him with the ball dancing around his feet. He feinted left. Jack jumped – he jumped with all his heart, his arms outstretched – but the ball swung to the right. He touched it with his fingertips, just a glancing blow, but he wasn't tall enough and he couldn't jump high enough, and the ball whacked into the back of the net.

“You muppet,” sneered Thomson, at half-time. “We're going to lose this, because of you.”

In the second half, with the snow falling so thickly that they could barely see, Villiers really stormed into them. Their sports master shouted from the touchline like a maniac. This was obviously their plan – to play a calm, defensive game in the first half, and then attack Barrons in the second half with everything they had.

Jack was good. He kept his eyes stuck to the ball and he threw himself wildly into save after save. Villiers attacked his goal eleven times, and every time he managed to keep them out.

“Come on, Villiers!” roared their games master. “We can't have a draw! We've got to annihilate them! Sack and pillage!”

There were only three minutes left. Villiers launched a fast, well-organized attack, passing the ball so quickly that the Barrons team couldn't touch them. Thomson was tackled and fell to the ground with a twisted ankle.

Jack, in goal, saw the Villiers forwards coming nearer and nearer, jinking and dodging their way through Barrons' last line of defence. He was so cold and frightened that his teeth were chattering. The small black boy was running toward him with the ball skipping around his toes. Villiers' star player, thought Jack. I don't stand a chance.

With less than a minute to go before the final whistle, the black boy ducked and spun around, avoided a tackle from Patel, cut around the back of him and came flying toward the goal.

“Keep your eye on the ball. Matthews, not the player,” Mr Brabham had always told him, so he did.

The small black boy left Barrons' full-backs standing still like a pair of postboxes. He came running up toward the goal and Jack
knew,
just knew, that this was it. This was where he lost the game. This was the moment for which Thomson and Patel would punish him, for the rest of his school career. After this, he would be lucky to find nothing more revolting in his bed than cornflakes and milk and marmalade.

The small black boy was smiling as he kicked the ball. The winning shot, that was what he obviously thought. And the funny thing was that Jack was affected by that smile, and liked him, and almost wanted him to score. But he jumped all the same, his arms outstretched, trying to reach the ball and deflect it from the goal. He heard himself say “
Unh!
” with effort.

And he knew, even as he jumped, that the ball was just too high, and just too far away. He wasn't tall enough or strong enough to reach it. He tried to stretch his arms out in mid-jump, but it was impossible. The ball was nearly into the net, and he was already falling.

But as he fell, he felt two strong hands seize him around the waist. He felt somebody lifting him, lifting him, and it seemed as if he were
flying. He reached for the ball with a last desperate effort and he caught it. It slammed right into his outstretched fingers, gritty with mud. He pulled it close to his chest and then he dropped to the ground, rolling over and over, just as the final whistle blew.

He sat up. People were cheering and clapping. Even Thomson was limping toward him, with both thumbs stuck up. Patel was slapping him on the back, and Woods was shouting, “Fantastic! Fantastic! The best save in the history of saves!”

He stood up, dazed, looking around. Somebody had lifted him. Somebody had picked him up. He could never have reached that ball on his own. But there was nobody there. The goal-mouth was empty, except for the snow that kept tumbling into it.