Stay Where You Are and Then Leave (9 page)

“Oh!” he cried, jumping up, almost kicking Alfie as his right foot lifted off the shoeshine box. “My papers! I can't lose them. Help me, there's a good chap. Grab as many as you can before they float away.”

Alfie ran around the station, gathering great handfuls as he went; they were everywhere—over by the tea shop, close to the ticket counter, near the tobacconist's, next to the newspaper stall. But he grabbed and he grabbed, and before he knew it he had more than forty pages in his hands, and as he looked around, trying to see whether there were any more in sight, his eyes fell on the top page that he was holding.

It was an official-looking document, fancy writing and expensive paper, with the words
EAST SUFFOLK & IPSWICH HOSPITAL
inscribed across the top and Latin writing underneath, even though no one could speak Latin anymore. Typed underneath were the words:

Returnees—One Page Review

And beneath that, in smaller type, the sentence:

Refer to File 3(b) for full patient assessments.

There were two columns, left and right, listing names and serial numbers, with another number listed after that, which Alfie assumed had something to do with File 3(b). He didn't mean to read the list of names along the left-hand column—he wasn't really interested—but the problem was that it was a page filled with words, and for as long as Alfie could remember, whenever he saw pages filled with words he wanted to read them. His eyes glanced across the records and quickly settled on one single entry.

He blinked, uncertain whether he could believe the evidence of his own eyes, almost dropping all the papers that he had collected. And just at that moment, the man from the shoeshine stand stepped forward and plucked all the documents out of his hand.

“That's all of them, I think,” he said, looking around the station as he piled the pages back inside his folder. “Thanks for your help, boy. How much do I owe you?”

Alfie said nothing; simply stared up at the man, open-mouthed. He couldn't find any words to answer. There were too many things running through his brain.

“What's the matter with you?” the man asked. “Cat got your tongue?”

And still Alfie remained silent. The man raised an eyebrow and shook his head, as if to suggest that he didn't have time for any more of this nonsense before saying, “We'll call it a penny, shall we?” He tossed a coin into Alfie's hat, picked up his briefcase, and turned away before stopping and looking back once again.

“Are you quite all right, boy?” he asked, his tone a little more sympathetic now. “It's just that I'm a doctor, you see. And you look as if you've had a funny turn. If there's anything wrong, you can tell me. I might be able to help.”

Alfie shook his head. “I'm fine,” he said, the words coming out in a croak, the way they did whenever Margie woke him too early in the morning.

“All right then,” said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders and turning away. “Thanks for the shine.”

Slowly Alfie made his way back over to his shoeshine box and sat down on the customers' seat. He picked up all his cloths and brushes and polishes and put them away, removed the footrest from the top and replaced it under the lid before snapping the entire thing shut with the gold catch. Then, standing up, he made his way out of King's Cross and began to walk home.

And all the way there he thought of the single line that had jumped out at him from the East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital document.

A simple phrase written halfway down the page, on the left-hand side.

Summerfield, George
, it had said.

DOB: 3/5/1887.

Serial no.: 14278.

 

CHAPTER 6

FOR ME AND MY GIRL

On the way back from the station, Alfie remembered the day his father left; how he wouldn't allow anyone to come to Liverpool Street to see him off.

“I know what it'll be like down there,” he said, shaking his head. “All those wives and mothers crying into their hankies, making a spectacle of themselves. Let's just say our good-byes here and be done with it. It's not like I'll be gone long anyway. It'll all be over by Christmas.”

He was leaving for Aldershot Barracks to begin basic training, and Alfie could tell that he was both excited and nervous to be going. After he signed up, Margie refused to speak to him for two days and came around only when it was clear that his mind was made up and there was nothing she could do about it. Even Granny Summerfield stopped declaring that they were finished, they were all finished, and started telling everyone on Damley Road how proud she was of her son, for he was one of the first to enlist, to answer the call of king and country, and he would surely be kept safe on account of his bravery.

As he left number twelve, Margie threw her arms around his neck and whispered into his ear something that made him bite his lip and hug her even closer. The neighbors came out of their houses to see him off, and Joe Patience pressed a packet of Golden Virginia tobacco into Georgie's hand and wished him luck.

“Don't do anything I wouldn't do,” he said, which made Alfie's dad laugh and shake his head.

“You won't be far behind him, I suppose,” said Granny Summerfield, looking back and forth between her son in his uniform and Joe in a pair of trousers and a working man's shirt. “You and Georgie were always thick as thieves. I'm surprised you didn't sign up together.” There was a note of hostility in her voice, and Joe couldn't meet her eye.

“There are plenty of ways to help the war effort,” he said. “I'm not sure that killing people is the most productive.”

“Well, you might not have any choice,” she replied. “It's all volunteers now, but if things don't go our way, then—”

“There's always a choice, Mrs. Summerfield,” insisted Joe, a little more steel entering his voice now. “I make up my own mind about things, you know that.”

Granny Summerfield's face grew red with anger, but Georgie said that this wasn't a morning for politics, that he just wanted to shake hands with his friends and hug his family, and reluctantly she stopped talking. But it was obvious that she had a lot more to say.

The last person Georgie said good-bye to was Alfie, who was standing in the street with his back pressed up against the front parlor window.

“You're the man of the house now,” he said, looking him directly in the eye, and Alfie felt his stomach sink at the idea of so much responsibility. “You'll watch out for your mother while I'm away, won't you? And your granny?”

“Yes,” said Alfie. “But you'll come home again, won't you?”

“Before you've even noticed that I've gone.”

And with that, he strolled down the street with his kit bag on his back as if he were simply going to the dairy for a day's work, before stopping and turning, lifting a hand in the air to wave good-bye, and then disappearing around the corner. But that was nearly four years ago now, and Alfie hadn't laid eyes on his father since then.

There were letters, of course. The first came from Aldershot: he told his family that the train journey had been great fun and that everyone was excited about what was ahead of them. Most of the new recruits were from London, but there were a couple of boys from Norwich and Ipswich, and even a Plymouth lad who'd only moved to Clapham six months earlier to take up a job on the buses. A fellow called Sergeant Clayton was in charge, and he made them line up in the courtyard and tell him their names. He played the tartar something awful, Georgie said, shouting at anyone who didn't say
Yes, sir; No, sir; Three bags full, sir
. He had two corporals with him, Wells and Moody, standing on either side, saying very little.

The barracks have two rows of ten beds each. I'm near the door with a boy called Mitchell on one side of me—Arsenal supporter, but I won't hold that against him—and another called Jonesy on the other. And you won't believe this, Alfie, but Jonesy only has a copy of that book that Mr. Janá
č
ek gave you for your birthday.
Robinson Crusoe
! I nearly laughed when I saw it, I swear I did.

Margie kept Georgie's letters safe and didn't like Alfie to handle them in case they got dirty. When Granny Summerfield was holding one up to her eyes so she could see it better, he could see his mum watching nervously, wishing that she'd just let her read it aloud to her like she'd offered to do at the start.

“He makes it sound like it's just a big game,” said Granny Summerfield when she had finished one of the early letters, and Margie took it back quickly and placed it between the pages of her Bible. “I thought I brought him up to be smarter than that.”

“If he was smart, then he wouldn't have signed up in the first place,” said Margie.

Of course, things were different now that Alfie was nine. No one was volunteering anymore. There was conscription. You reached the age of eighteen and that was it. You had to go to the war. Alfie spent a lot of time thinking that if they didn't sort things out in the next nine years, then he'd be going to the war too, an idea that frightened him. It didn't matter anymore if you were married, so there was no point in taking your sweetheart to the church to get out of serving. Even if you did, you'd be going off to France on your honeymoon alone.

Unless you were Joe Patience, that is, who had only just come back to number sixteen after two years away, although he hadn't been serving in France or fighting in Belgium. Instead, he'd been locked up in Wormwood Scrubs because he refused to become a soldier. They only let him out again because he'd suffered so many beatings inside; the last one had come so close to killing him that there'd been the threat of a prison scandal. Now Joe was back living two doors up, but he almost never left his house and certainly never sat outside playing his clarinet like he did before the war began. Granny Summerfield called him a scoundrel and a coward; Mrs. Milchin said that he should be strung up on the nearest lamppost. Even Helena Morris, who used to be sweet on him, said that he shouldn't be allowed to live near decent, respectable people.

Only Margie and Old Bill Hemperton still had anything to do with him. Margie insisted that he was Georgie's oldest friend and that whatever the rights and wrongs of his situation, he'd suffered enough for his beliefs. Old Bill simply said that he was his own man too and wouldn't be told who he could and couldn't speak to, not while there was still breath in his body. Neither of which was a good enough excuse to satisfy Granny Summerfield, who couldn't hear the man's name spoken aloud without flying into a rage.

Three months after he turned the corner of Damley Road, Georgie was no longer in England. Along with the other new soldiers, he took a train to Southampton and from there a boat to Calais, and after that his letters started to arrive less frequently, and when they did they sometimes had great black marks through the lines so Alfie and his mum couldn't read every word.

“That's the bosses,” explained Margie. “They read everyone's letters and if there's anything in there that they don't want us to know about, they cross it out. They don't want us to know the truth. They're afraid of it.”

The tone of Georgie's letters changed over time. When he was in training at Aldershot he used to tell stories about the pranks the men played on each other at the barracks and the trouble they were always getting into with Sergeant Clayton. It sounded more like a holiday camp than anything else. But when he got to France, everything changed. He stopped talking about the soldiers serving alongside him and just talked about himself, about how he was feeling.

It's horrible here. We spend our days digging trenches seven feet deep in the mud, then before they collapse we have to build wooden fortifications at the side. They say the Germans have steel walls on theirs. Whenever it rains, the sides of our trenches cave in and we have to use whatever we can find to scoop the water out. Sometimes I use my helmet but I'm not supposed to, as that's the quickest way to get a bullet through the head. There's rats everywhere. And worse. I could live with the rats. I don't know what half these creatures are. Why did I come here, I don't know. God, what a mistake.

Margie didn't let Alfie read this letter. But he knew it had come because he'd seen it on the mat, the War Office seal displayed prominently on the envelope. “It's private,” Margie told him after she read it in the broken armchair in front of the fireplace. “Just between your father and me. But he says he loves you and he thinks about you all the time.”

“Read it out,” said Alfie.

“No.”

“Read it out!”

“I said no!” cried Margie, leaping up so quickly that Alfie jumped back in surprise. At which point she simply stared at him, looked as if she might burst into tears, and ran from the room.

She didn't put this letter between the pages of the Bible. Instead she hid it underneath her mattress, but Alfie knew all Margie's hiding places and waited until she was gone to work to read it. He read it five times, and each time it made him sadder and sadder.

After this, Margie didn't let him read any of the letters that came, but she put them in the same place so he always knew where to find them and where to hide them again whenever she called up the stairs to him.

God, Margie, what am I doing here? It's awful. And I've done terrible things. Can't live with myself sometimes. I think of you and—

“Alfie, I'm home! Are you upstairs? Come down and tell me how your day was!”

They say we're getting closer to the Belgian lines, but it's hard to believe we're getting closer to anything. We dig more trenches and let the old ones collapse in on themselves. Then we wait till it gets dark and Corporal Moody decides whose turn it is to go over the top. Ten at a time. Ten more standing on the ladder. Ten more on the base of the trench. No point complaining. Sometimes I think it would be easier if—