Day Read Online Free Page A

in common: understanding food.
    Bash, we called it in the camp. Bash. Maybe that made it easier to cope with. You expected things of food, you had high hopes; never quite knew where you were with bash. And you had to be careful with it, keep things equal and correct.
    Not that they didn’t have more than enough at the minute. A comfortable ration for this afternoon and a bottle of cold tea apiece – real tea, none of that ersatz stuff made out of daisies, or God knew what – and meals laid on for the rest of the time, generous portions.
    But you could still worry.
    The thought of food had followed Alfred for six years now, long after the end of the war: that and the preventative hunger, the drive to take what he saw, whenever he saw it, in case there was nothing else after. He’d kept chocolate with him every day; and a new slice of bread each morning, to help him be at ease. This was how you discovered that you were an animal – you caught yourself hoarding, savage, feeding: mind shut.
    You’d think all those books would make a difference, wouldn’t you, our kid? That’s what everyone said would happen. You end up around reading people, ones who like their words and are comfortable with them, and you show an interest, a curiosity, and that’s your affair and no one else’s business and you find yourself growing – a little chap, but big inside, quite roomy. Only then they pile in, the reading people, gang up on you and interfere and they want you to be like them, their boy, their babby, and they give you more refined concerns – according to them, you’ve never been bothered by anything worthwhile – so now you have rarefied worries and delicate problems, like your head’s been turned into a parlour and there’s nothing there can stand your touch – and they give you words that you can’t quite operate to put in your new voice and this is supposed to make you finer and a finished man. A great opportunity for self-improvement, war.
    Unless you’re hungry.
    Then you end up just like any other dog.
    Still, they’d had a point. Being an autodidact – horrible word, autodidact, but one of the first you teach yourself: all by yourself, without the reading people, without anyone – being an autodidact had made a difference. Without the books, you might not have been so thoroughly ashamed. Or disappointed. Your shame might have been unavoidable, very probably it was, but not your disappointment.
    Oh, give it a rest, though, can’t you? All of that was years ago and you could have had it worse.
    And you were warned – by someone who was taught in schools – Ivor Sands told you and his whole life is books – go scraping about in your past and you’ll get hurt, you’ll remember and hurt. But you wouldn’t be told.
    Alfred rubbed his fingers through his scalp.
    Won’t need a punch in the head at this rate – doing it very effectively from within.
    He lowered his eyelids, turned his face to the heat and stared at the muffled light, the blood sun.
    Time to get yourself in order, Day. No more self-indulgence. Think of your egg – your nice half chooky egg. That shouldn’t be neglected.
    He looked down at it, peeled away the shell, his mouth suddenly overinterested, wet.
    My, but wasn’t it all just a big, free university – the university of war – with HE
and armour piercing and incendiaries, just for a lark. And so much to find out: the far edges of people and the bloody big doors into nowhere that you don’t want to know about.
    Enough of that, though. If you keep yourself in charge of your thinking then things stay friendly and polite.
    So keep in charge.
    And then what?
    Let us consider the things for which we should be grateful.
    For instance?
    For instance, you wouldn’t deny that it left you with a grand appreciation of your grub. When there is food, you don’t take it for