I was facing three German effigies, talking and hovering around with rifles in hand as I stood before them, unarmed, listening as they decided my fate. I would fight back. No escape.

  When my father was out on patrol in the Great War, a German sneaked up about thirty feet away before Pa saw him. After slinging a bomb, Pa saw him fall, but he wasn’t satisfied with that. He gave the German a couple more and when he went to look, the man looked like a strainer.

  Fight back harder than they would have anticipated. That’s the lesson I got.

  “I tell ya,” the boy said. “My father was a hero in the war, but I’d clobber him if he ever tried to leave me and my mum alone with a sick kid.”

  “You’d sock him,” I replied. “And he’d give it to you right back, harder’n you’d want. Give you a nice haymaker.”

  The boys continued talking, and I could barely hear what was being said, as though all the words were being spoken completely in German.

  Seeing images of my own bayoneted or bullet-ejected blood splotched on the pavement and trickling into the pools of water below, my rifle—or, rather, my bicycle—only a few steps away, my traitorous legs wanted a getaway, unconcerned with what my mind had to say.

  Had my bicycle been a rifle, my arms might have fired successive shots and seen these three German soldiers lying face down in the mud.

  My legs flew into motion, betraying me, and this signalled the boys to move in.

  They pushed and forced me to the ground, laying boots and punching at my ribs. Lying curled on the ground, I held my hands tight to my head. I was kicked repeatedly.

  The boys stopped after a few minutes, and I lay inert for a time, waiting for a shot to be fired.

  When none came, I lifted myself onto my hands and knees, coughing up a bit of blood. Looking through blurred eyes, half of my body soaked in mud and water, I saw a cigarette dangling from the boy’s lip. He was grinning and staring at me.

  I saw in that boy’s gaze the last time my father had been home. I had helplessly observed whenever my father simply walked by us and out the door. This German strawman was right, and knew more than what I, until recently, had understood: while not responsible for the family’s separation, as the man of the house, I was the cause of its perpetuation. And this haggard boy had even provided a solution that, while not ideal, was right. He had beaten into me that I would have to confront my father to get the family back together again and fight back harder than Pa would have anticipated.

  Now standing around mocking and challenging me to try any sort of retaliation, this young man’s gaze disallowed any further association with Violet, for in this fight I had no chance of victory. His still, constant stare granted me permission to smother all the stifled laughter on his face.

  You must go with your gut because so many situations you are in are not planned. Your reaction must be instinctual and emotional too. You want to charge a machine gun nest when you see your men being killed, or because you see a section of the army being held up somewhere. It is your reflex, to go and get them. You don’t think a lot about anything. Just like when you are bullied as a boy and forced to fight back.

  Lunging at the boy with all the force of my frail body, I thrashed at him like a wild and reckless animal. I was a gazelle, once weak and unstable, suddenly lashing out against its lion tormentor. In that instant, flashes of lightning blinded me. I toppled him onto his back. Both of us splashed into the mud. I struck three successive blows: one quickly, the others decisively, all into the boy’s face. Each blow seemed to surprise him, and me, more than the last.

  No one moved. For an instant, I startled myself by thinking I had won.

  He suddenly revived, his shock turning to anger. Not apparently hurt, he struck out. My face became his focus, then my stomach. I was sent to the ground, breathless.

  I lay there, enraged but immobile.

  Watching the lines of their boots, I awaited further punishment.

  Their boots did not move, perhaps waiting momentarily to see whether I would regain the fury that had overwhelmed them.

  But before anyone could strike more blows, before I could rise, the boots scampered away.

  And with their departure came a hint of the strange and surprising sensation that somehow, in some small way, I had accomplished something.

  4

  The evening’s offering was a reddish-brown lentil stew that smelled horrid. Some nausea to add to my wretchedness, considering I had been trampled by three horses a few nights ago. A dessert of canned fruit sat in a bowl in the middle of the table, out of my reach. Pa sat at the head of the table, all of us together for dinner in our London home for the first time in what must have been years.

  Why did he come back, and why now, with my face all banged up?

  Full bowls of steaming stew sat unconsumed on the table, our visages flickering in the hazy light and wavering shadows of a sputtering tallow candle. Pa resembled a grey ghost, some quivering manifestation that was not conceivably human, and that could not possibly be here.

  Pa ate more greedily than ever before, a relapse, I was sure, from army-turned-mining days when justifiably presuming that someone might snatch up his meal at any time; or when extended periods of hunger were followed by wretched food options such as sour jam and maggot-filled cheese, or other fare such as the meal we had before us tonight, disgusting and only tempting when the sole alternative was famine.

  Pa appeared to have aged decades since I had seen him last. The creases on his face seemed more pronounced now, his cratered countenance sunken into his skull and resembling sand charred from the heat of the sun. Maybe it was the lighting in this room, or the soot on his face that Mum once scrubbed and cleaned for him after his shift, in the brief time we lived in South Leeds together. Mum would crouch down over the bathtub in our tenement as she rubbed his skin, me and Ian observing and saying nothing. To us, that was all we knew of marital love.

  Ian and I sat staring at Pa with uninterrupted intensity.

  The ticking of the wall clock was deafening.

  No one except Pa was eating, and he didn’t seem to take notice or care. I examined the table, my eyes coming upon a picture of Christ our Saviour halfway up the wall, and another painting of a flowered meadow. A series of church bells began ringing faintly in the distance.

  Mum, her red-brown hair in a tight bun, sat with her chin in her hand. She turned to examine my injuries, my chin bruised and swollen, and my right cheek on fire. Peering into her green eyes, I imagined that she might have once read from books and poems inspiring her to fight for love. Maybe she had even read the dirty poem about lovemaking by Petronius, although I didn’t want to think about that. She certainly must have snuck out of her house at night to meet Pa.

  Searching for understanding, knowing now that we had these common experiences, all I saw was her eyebrows curled in wonder; and I questioned, as I focused down on the wood grain on the table, what she suspected of me. She must have recognized my new self confidence. After all, I was in love with a beautiful woman. Pa’s war letters were guiding my life. Whatever she presumed about me sneaking around with other boys and starting fights on the streets when I should have been at home sleeping, I had the notion that she did not want her suppositions to be true. She wanted an obedient boy, and not a mutinous and slipshod one.

  “Go to your room,” she said abruptly.

  I began rising out of my seat and was surprised to see her glancing over at Ian.

  “Why?” Ian asked as I sat back down again. Ian didn’t break his focus on Pa, who had stopped eating to return his son’s stare.

  Without warning or further provocation, she slapped Ian across the face. He immediately rose from the table, crying, spilling stew, and nearly knocking the candle over. With tears in his eyes, he vanished upstairs. The banging of the bedroom door echoed down the narrow hallway. Her cheeks had reddened.

  Good for Mum, but poor Ian. Mum had behaved irrationally and excessively and for no valid reason, but at least she had taken some sort of disciplinary action. Not what I was used to seeing around here, that’s for certain.

  She glanced over at the wall clock as Pa’s eyes remained on her. Turning toward him, she threw her shoulders back and stretched.

  I was next.

  Pa quickly downed the contents of his water glass before rising out of his chair to stand over me. My attention shifted back to the scratches and crevices of the wooden table. That table had never been so fascinating before.

  “Your Ma sent me a telegram,” he said, grabbing me by the chin and forcing my face out of the shadows, away from the beloved table and closer to the candlelight. I winced in pain.

  “She said something was wrong,” he continued. “That our oldest boy, responsible for his brother and mother, the man of the house, was kicking like a steer. That he’s sneaking out at night, fighting and talking back to his mother. I saw you wanted to start a scrap last time I was home, so not a big surprise I suppose.”

  That was why he was here. Mum knew I was leaving at night, and maybe how often I missed school, too. She must have told him that I was refusing to do my evening Bible studies before dinner as I had since I was a boy, maybe surmising my motivation being to hurt her without threat of reprisal, except to miss dinners occasionally. As I refused to nurture my spirit, she said, she wouldn’t be nourishing my body. But with dinners like this filthy concoction, that didn’t concern me much.

  Pa had my head contorted toward her now, and, peering into her sea-green eyes, I got the sympathy I had been searching for only minutes before; her expression reflected my own.

  “Stop it, let him go,” Mum said. Pa glanced at her and released his hand.

  “Where you been off to at night?” he asked.

  The clicking clock and the fabric of the table lampshade gave me no idea what to say, except: I didn’t ever sneak out unless on patrol or listening post between the trench lines. When you went out on patrol at night between the trenches, in no man’s land, with a Sergeant and an officer, you came across three Germans who beat it. You went after them, but they slipped away. You had revolvers but dare not fire or you would have bombs and everything else coming your way. My three Germans slithered away too, and I had no way to stop them.

  I verbalized the only words that came to mind.

  “I went to the theatre,” I said.

  Pa said nothing, and I could feel his stare.

  “Don’t try to hoodwink me,” he replied, shifting as if poising to strike me with the back of his blackened hand. “And look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  Pa’s eyes were red, apparently dry and stinging. My gaze was still important to him when he accused me of deceit, as though he could discern insincerity visually.

  “So, who were these boys you fought?” he asked.

  “I fell,” I said. Pa’s face was askew, his dark, narrow eyes and pallid complexion expressing frustrated disappointment. I peered over at the wall, Christ’s picture staring back at me, hands outstretched, knowing that my fabrication would soon be discovered. My father’s stare I could handle, but not my Lord’s. So, I added: “After some boys pushed me.”

  “Really? Who?”

  I glanced back down at the marks on the lovely table made through years of plates and cutlery falling at erratic angles and with varying force. I should not have said anything about the theatre. I had met an exquisite woman and had fought with some boys from school who wouldn’t let me see her. That’s what I should have said, instead of aggravating Pa with my silence. He would understand battling for the opportunity to see a woman again.

  “He didn’t know them,” Mum said.

  “Really?” Pa asked.

  Without moving or attempting a reply, I simply sat there with my shoulders slumped. The candle sputtered, and Mum wiped her forehead with her hand. I could not tell him who they were. I wouldn’t. I had to withhold this information, the same as I would keep confidential any secret that, if revealed, might cause me further beatings and accusations.

  I wanted to tell Pa how I had taken on three older boys in a fight and, at least for a moment, believed I had won. That I didn’t think of bravery or courage and what that meant, but my cowardly legs had simply acted only to escape. Much like a rat or a pig. But if I said anything about fighting back against boys who knew where I was going at night, and who might possibly return with knives, bats and other more aggressive accomplices to finish the fight the way they wanted it finished, then Mum would bar my window and lock the doors. Or worse, she would take away my bicycle. I couldn’t have that. Let them believe that this was a simple, random act of violence.

  Pa’s gaze was hovering over me, and I mustered the words which formed on my lips:

  “Some boys from school pushed me, but I don’t know their names. The fight was over a girl.” I shifted my weight in the seat. The stew was no longer steaming, and the smell of the bowl’s brown, lukewarm contents nauseated me.

  As the candle spilled wax, I began to spew out nonsense, starting what would’ve been a capricious and blatantly fabricated explanation about how I met the boys that night. I was grateful when Pa interrupted.

  “Your brother sure thinks a lot of you,” he said, turning toward me. He leaned over the candle to illuminate an unshaven and emaciated face, and rancid breath. “Ian can hardly breathe sometimes, and he does nothing but sleep now.”

  I did not respond immediately, which only annoyed him. What I said next irritated him more.

  “I know, ya,” I replied. “I know better than you.”

  I stirred my grimy stew. Pa forced my chin up again and into the candlelight, contorting my head. I protested with a shout as his hands pushed hard against my cheek.

  “Stop,” Mum said. “Don’t fuss. You’re hurting him.”

  “How old are you now?” he asked, his grip firm.

  “Fourteen,” I replied. “Fourteen and a half.”

  “Stop,” Mum repeated. “He’s hurt. Let him be.”

  Pa’s expression turned from anger to tempered astonishment, perhaps from having become aware of my age this way; maybe thinking me much younger. He may have wanted his son to stay a boy when, in the only time we spent together, we had fished at Uncle Devon’s house during those wonderful summers in medieval Northaw. When my endless questions had led me to ask why fish couldn’t breathe in air, then having inquired as to whether Ian was like a fish in that way, Pa had replied that Ian was especially sensitive to the smog.

  “What’s smog?” I had asked.

  “Smoke from factories. Chimneys.”

  “Why can we breathe, and he has troubles, then?”

  “Some fish stay alive out of water longer than others,” had been his final reply before we sat, for the next hour, staring out at the river’s undulations and contemplating what this meant. Pa had told me about Ian’s diminished lung capacity, which was brought on by pollutants that filled the streets and the interior of our Whitechapel home. When I pulled a lengthy fish out of the river, a sturgeon, I watched as he removed the hook and threw the flopping, shiny mass on the ground. I envisioned my brother with a scaled chest and full tail, his silvery body intermittently writhing with spasms in the dirt.

  “I was seventeen when I enlisted,” Pa said now, bringing me back to the table in our home. “What do you think of enlisting? You’re young, but almost a man.”

  I didn’t have a reply. I hadn’t contemplated my own death before reading Pa’s journal. Notions of losing one’s life had once seemed inconsequential next to friends, girls, books and magazines, radio shows, and after-school games. But early, youthful death in my father’s writings had made the idea so easy, so palpable, that the notion of dying in my confrontation with the boys struck me now as a possibility. One wrong blow to the head, or a knife drawn and sunk into my abdomen would have done the job.

  “The army’s not for me,” I said. “Especially, not during wartime.”

  Pa coughed and stared at me with a dazed expression. Beneath my words was a concern more for a girl and the company of disreputable boys than for responsibilities, including those my father had thrust upon me.

  As I lay in my bed upstairs staring at the cracks in the ceiling, my parents began shouting about mortgage payments that were apparently weeks behind. There were letters I noticed at the post office, addressed from the bank, as I had been surveying for others from Albert in South Leeds. More had been arriving recently.

  “The bank’s going to repossess the house,” Mum yelled.

  “Apparently,” I told Ian, who was lying down and whimpering beside me. “We might not be able to live here anymore. Bankers might be moving in.”

  From my father’s calm reply, he seemed to want people from the bank to live here instead of us.

  As the front door creaked open and then slammed closed, Pa probably on his way back to South Leeds, I realized what I had done.

  The fight I had engaged in, which had led to Pa’s concern for me, had caused him to return to his London home.

  And I had the power to do more of the same.

  5

  A few weeks later, a game of Pitch and Toss started up in the yard after school one day, the lads playing for Hershey bars, and Black Cat and Navy Cut cigarettes. The job of teacher lookout was relegated to a kid who had no money or valuables, and who was lectured on the importance of his job by those who did.

  Having nothing to bet, that was me.

  I whistled a few times when I saw Ebenezer Rattray, the principal of the school with round glasses and hair parted straight down the middle, as he came out of the school on his way home.

  Seeing the gathering, the Scrooge scoffed, rubbed at his thick brown moustache, and stopped before us. He squinted at me.

  “Nicholas Dixon?” he asked.

  “That’s me, Mr. Scrooge,” I replied with a smile. Some of the boys laughed.

 

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