Chapter 44 43 bernard

There is no doubt that Macy's son will cherish Lieutenant Meng's letter.It must say that their father died in the line of duty.RAF Corporal, young man in blue uniform.Will always be remembered with this image.Metal framed photo on fireplace.Medal of Order of Myanmar in the box.Their father fought for his country in India and was a dog in the line of duty.What other words can make the two sons cherish more than these?They will be proud of their father. Sometimes I wish I had died in that shed with him. I was the only Brit in the prison, most of the others went home or were moved to safer locations.The sergeant said that the two week sentence is over quickly, take the punishment and forget about it, you can go home in no time.Two weeks at most.

Then the RAF put me in a cell with four Indians.They are coolies.I am a fine private, an Englishman, locked up with unruly coolies, thieves, and scoundrels.They were the ones the RAF took great pains to guard against.My cellmates are all standard criminals, caught when they stick their brown fingers at something.Possibly even Macy's murderer.But I had the same mattress as them, on a stone floor as hard as a ration biscuit.Use the same tin cup and plate, same small spoon.Prison was no pain for coolies.Fixed meals.Do not have to work.They slept all day long, pushing away the bugs crawling on their bodies with their hands, and chattering indistinctly from their mouths.Neither the heat that smothered in the cell nor the dust surrounding the stench like a sandstorm disturbed the natives.got used to.But for the British, the filthy sweat running down my body day and night, stinging my eyes, dripping salt into my mouth, itching me unconscious.The sweat seeped into my mattress until it was as drenched as a biscuit dropped in tea.

I had to be on guard against these thieves, and I couldn't sleep with my eyes closed, not even a doze.I have a pen and airmail.The British guards gave me these after hearing that I had lost all my gear in the fire.I put the two items down on the mattress, away from the eight thieves and the eight jealous black eyes that keep looking at me.I want to write a letter home to Queenie on this airmail.There's no way I'd have to fudge what happened: moving to a better location, hoping to be home by Christmas, that sort of thing.No need to mention the court-martial, or Lieutenant Meng making me an example of a court-martial, and the officer who was assigned to defend me, who couldn't find anything in my past service record that would change the trial, Let me escape the ignominious sentence of confinement for two weeks with the most detestable man that civilized man can imagine.

Letters had to be placed on the floor to write on.With my back turned to the coolies, I could still feel their urgency to know what the Englishman was doing.It started with the usual Dear Queenie and then it stopped.The letter paper advised me to think twice before writing, with two exclamation points stamped at the top of the paper.Think twice! During the last war, my father was also in the army.That war was called the Great War.At that time he was sent to France.Just a young man, barely nineteen, with a wife and a young son in his hometown.He wrote to his wife, my mother, Angie, and said very well.Ma pictured him drinking red wine with the locals and eating loaves as long as his arms.And of course the battle with the Germans: a gun battle here, a loud shelling there.She would say on the doorstep that he was at the Somme, as if he would suddenly appear on the road in half an hour, and not know until he was sent back that he had lived in the mud of the gun crater for three years.He didn't come back by himself, but was brought back by the truck, and was very visible in the street (everyone came out to watch).A package delivered to the twenty-first.Two men, one on each side, helped him up the steps and knocked on the door.Ma answered the door, unbuttoned her apron, and greeted her hero with a smile.

But they had to give him a push to let him in. She wanted his body back, almost intact, but it was a body that would be incontinent when the door was closed too loudly.At night he sat on the bed shivering in his neck-length striped pajamas.He would scream in his sleep as if someone were about to knock out his teeth, and the buttons of his pajamas would fall across the room like shrapnel splinters.Whenever the dog barked, Ma had to coax him out from under the bed.She told me: Your father is out of his mind.As an eight-year-old me, I wished that if someone could fix his brain, he could fix his brain.

His condition gradually improved (a little) under the patient care of his mother.She fed him with a bib around his neck, swept his excrement on the floor, and gently persuaded him to take off his pants as she helped him change them.Ma helped him put his gabardine coat and hat on, and took him down the street with us.A young girl, not quite a woman, handed him a white feather.He played with it like a toy, stroking his cheeks with soft fur.Then mom saw it.She cursed at the girl loudly. If someone hadn't called the police to deal with it, Mom would have hurt her severely.Ma yelled to everyone onlookers: He had done his duty.

She made me hold his hand all the way home. He dug a trench in the courtyard.I watched him dig (a straight ditch), which was the first (he dug four more).Ma planted him geraniums in it and showed him how to shovel the soil back into the ditch.He sometimes sat with his head in his hands for hours, watching the growth and waiting for the petals to open.When the first blinding red flower appeared, he cried and wailed. But he is no longer the father I used to be.Every time he saw me it was like meeting me for the first time, even if I had just left the room, I was a stranger when I came back.He used to let me sit on his shoulders.Would teach me how to throw, hands over shoulders, like a cricketer.Well done, Bernard Jr.There is progress, my son, there is progress.And bring me The Boys' Book to read, even if I can't read it myself.When he came back from get off work (from the bank), I would climb into his lap and ask him to read me the story of the charge ("The Saber and the Spur" or "The Chief's White Slave").When he left to fight, I wanted to know where he was going, and the last words he said to me were: Go to the front, Bernard, Papa is going to the field.

Mom aged sixty years in ten years.The whole person is shriveled and shrunken.She would want to have a big family, not just me.But her husband couldn't do anything anymore, at least not in her presence.She saw only dry white stains on the sheets and on his trousers.She will turn around and leave.Call me to clean up. She has a big house and a small pension.The family silver cruet that sat on the living room table disappeared one at a time.So did the ring on her finger, leaving only the wedding ring.Whenever she looked at her father in the courtyard, she would turn her fingers.She rented out rooms in the house, and spent her time walking up and down the stairs collecting rent, maintaining order, or listening at the living room door to prevent evil from entering the house.After I graduated and left school, she put on her hat and best coat (redeemed twice from the pawn shop) and visited the bank where her father worked as a teller.Got a job for me when I got back and started work the next day.She only said: This is what they owe him.

She died at the age of forty-two.Cancer, people whispered.Breast tumors ravaged life from within her.Before dying, she asked with difficulty: Who will take care of him?I didn't say a word.What can I say?Who will take care of him? I can. Dad was calm when Queenie moved in.Take care of your own vegetable garden and get a chair (by yourself).He knew Queenie was a little different, and his eyes followed her.She cleaned up the house with a touch of femininity: flowers, pinch cloths on the sideboards.Pa began to smile, and tapped his foot to the wind-up gramophone.Humming <Tell me the way home>.She danced with Pa in front of the fire, one foot at a time.Then came the war, and the air strikes.He became incontinent again and wore a bib while eating.We couldn't get him into the dugout.He was always under the bed, shaking like a little girl.

He'd better die for real.Queenie said it once. For the first time, I understood that she could be so ruthless. After the air raid, I had to coax my father out from under the bed with bread and jam and the radio was blaring like we were living in a dance hall.Sometimes thinking no one was watching, he would throw his arms around an imaginary partner and dance in the room by himself. Young people are no longer enough in this new war, and the recruits are getting older every week.There is no other way, working as a security watch and curfew duty is not enough.The rear does not need a bank teller who writes books all day.It was my turn to charge.

All I knew was that I was going overseas.Spend a week with a loved one on a pro-holiday before heading out.Of course I didn't know where I was being sent, but Queenie kept asking.She said: "If they issue you a tropical uniform it must be somewhere hot.The brethren I trained with thought it was ridiculous that summer uniforms could also represent Iceland or Siberia.You must know where to go, can't you just ask them?She thought I just didn't want to talk.Of course they wouldn't have told us where we were sent, otherwise word would have been circulating in every dance hall where the brother in his cool blue uniform visited.They won't tell me.I said to her and finally even raised my voice and shouted. I don't want to spend my last day with her.We should kiss and hug.Of course, she let me kiss her and hug her, but only because I was her husband and was about to leave where no one knew.She would follow me, but lay there like a motionless rag, not even hugging me.As for the kiss she turned her head away.I can only kiss her on the cheek.I will say that my mother would let me kiss her like this.When waving goodbye to me, she said: Take care and remember to write.But before I could go down the last flight of stairs, she closed the door. A few days before his departure, Liverpool was overcast with clouds and the sky was like dishwater.Queenie would call it a wet weekend. (I'll be honest) I leave with a heavy heart, really hoping that saying goodbye to Queenie was a little better.No matter where I am, I seem to hear her slamming the door shut.The sound of boots in the woodland, the sound of the train door, the sound of gunfire in the distance, all reminded me of the sound of the door closing.This is of course very stupid. In the drizzle, I stood on the deck watching the coastline gradually sinking into the sea.I never left England.There is only one experience of looking back at the land in my memory.That was on Dimchurch Beach.Paddle too far.I was terrified when I found out, Mom was a kind of blurry figure on the beach, telling me to go back.Dad waded through the water and put me safely on his shoulders. England disappears so quickly.Before long, there was nothing around but the sea.My feet were wobbly and I couldn't maintain my balance or find my center of gravity.I sat looking at the place where my hometown disappeared.It was there, etched into my eyes like an afterimage from gazing into the sun.The back view of Dad tending the vegetable garden, and the way Queenie waved before closing the door forcefully, are all indelible. I was holding my pen on the blue tissue paper on the cell floor, and I had stopped writing for so long that the sweat ran down my arm to the tip of the pen, dripping like tears.Soon the letter paper was too wet to write on.Dear Queenie was pasted into a blue smudge, and ended up being just a pool of ink.