Public Library and Other Stories Read Online Free Page A

mother opened it and the stranger said my father’s name and asked did he live here and my mother said yes, and the stranger said, who are you? and my mother said, I’m his wife, who are you? and the stranger said, pleased to meet you, I’m his brother. My father said almost nothing when it came to the past. My mother the same. The past was past. After my mother died, and when the Second World War was on TV all the time in anniversary after anniversary (fifty years since the start, fifty years since the end, sixty years since the start, sixty years since the end), he began to tell us one or two things that had happened to him, like about the men who were parachuted in for the invasion of Sicily but by mistake had been dropped too far out from land so the sea was full of them, their heads in the water and the ships couldn’t stop
, you couldn’t just stop a warship
,
we waved to them, we called down to them, we told them we’d be back for them, but we knew we wouldn’t and so did they.
    Now I tell my father, who’s five years dead,
    you know, I wrote to the Imperial War Museum recently about that old picture with your dad in it, and I asked them whether the white clothes he’s wearing meant anything special, a hospital worker or something, and a man wrote back and told me maybe your dad was an army baker but that to know for sure we’d need service records and that the problem with that is that 60% of First World War Army Records were burned in a German raid in 1940.
    Things get lost all the time, girl, he says.
    Do you know if he was a baker, maybe? I say.
    Silence.
    My grandfather doesn’t look much like my father in the picture, but he looks a bit like one of my brothers. I’ve no idea what he saw in his war. God knows. There’s no way of knowing. I’ll never know what his voice sounded like. I suppose it must have sounded a bit like my father’s. I suppose his voice was in my father’s head much like my father’s is in mine. I wonder if he could sing.
Red sails in the sunset
, my father sings right now, out of tune (or maybe to his own tune).
Way out on the sea.
Gas! – GAS! – quick, boys! –. That was the Wilfred Owen poem. In it gas was written first in small letters then in capitals, which, when I was at school, I’d thought very clever,
because of the way the realization that the gas was coming, or maybe the shouts about it, got louder the nearer it came.
Oh carry my loved one.
Home safely to me
. And Owen had convalesced, and met his friend Siegfried Sassoon, and learned to write a whole other kind of poetry from his early rather purple sonnets, at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, which was close to home, even though Edinburgh was itself a far country to me, at fifteen, in Inverness, when I first read Owen.
He sailed at the dawning. All day I’ve been blue.
    My father’s voice is incredibly loud, so loud that I’m finding it hard to think anything about anything. I try to concentrate. There was a thing I read recently, a tiny paragraph in the International New York Times, about a rare kind of fungus found nowhere else in the UK, but discovered growing in the grounds of Craiglockhart and believed by experts to have been brought there from mainland Europe on the boots of the convalescing soldiers. Microscopic spores on those boots and decades later the life. But I can’t even think about that because
Red sails in the sunset. I’m trusting in you
. Okay.
    I sing back, quite loud too, a song of my own choice.
War is stupid. And people are stupid.
    Don’t think much of your words, my father says. Or your tune. That’s not a song. Who in God’s name sang that?
    Boy George, I say. Culture Club.
    Boy George. God help us, my father says.
    The 1984 version of Wilfred Owen, I say.
    Hardly, he says. Boy George never saw a war. Christ. What a war would’ve done to him.
    Wilfred Owen was gay too, you know, I say.
    I say it because I know it will annoy him. But he doesn’t take the bait.