That night I dream of home and wake up with my face wet with tears, remembering the note I left my mother. I see my penciled writing, neat and defiant. I picture her roughened hands and broken nails, with my careless letter clutched to her chest, or more likely screwed into a furious ball and thrown across the room, with Marek trying to quieten her anger. I weep silently into my kit bag pillow, until I’ve cried myself out. Then I promise myself this must be the last time. Gee-gee Cousins would never cry. The sliver of light around the shutter turns from gray to white, and another day begins.
• • •
When we are finished with the stinking honey wagon and are back in the hut, preparing for another long, empty day, Ralph asks, “Would you like to visit the arts-and-crafts show this afternoon?” he asks. “It’s our hut’s turn.”
“An arts-and-crafts show?” says Bill in apparent amazement.
Ralph laughs. “You have to queue to get in. Some pretty astonishing things. There’s some clever blokes here. Shall we go?”
The hours tick by, minute by interminable minute, until it’s time for us to see the show, and then I pull my hat down over my ears to indicate my readiness, and anticipation mingles with my ever-present anxiety in a cocktail of jangled nerves and heightened perception.
Ralph and Max lead the way to a hut they call the school, and a long queue snakes up to the door. A guard with a bulbous red nose and small, beady bird eyes patrols the line. I think he will be the one to unmask me.
As we wait, Bill and Max talk about places they both know in London. Haggerston, Shoreditch, Hackney. They lived only a few miles from each other. It seems strange to me that they should live so close and not know each other.
“What did you do in civvy street?” asks Max.
“Clerk at Paddington,” Bill says. “Great Western. You?”
“Oh, this and that. The socialist bookshop one day, a printer’s the next. Help out here and there with the Transport and General Workers Union.” I decide with a thrill that Max is a socialist like my father.
Bill turns to Ralph. “And you?”
“Oh, I was at university.” He sounds apologetic, as if it’s some kind of disease.
Bill is a bit hesitant. “What’s your subject, like, if that’s how you say it?”
“I went to do medicine, but couldn’t stand the sight of blood, so after a year I switched to classics. Not much use to anyone.” Ralph smiles wryly.
I’ve never seen Bill so lost for words, and I understand that neither of these men mixes in the kind of social world he’s used to.
“How come…?” Bill falters.
“How come I’m not an officer?” suggests Ralph. “Easy really. I couldn’t see myself leading a charge out of the trenches and all that. Being in charge of hut seventeen is more than enough.”
While we shuffle forward in the queue, I keep my head down to hide my face. Some of the other prisoners crouch on their haunches while they wait, some smoke, some talk incessantly and some are as silent as me. I wonder if they’re afraid too.
Eventually it’s our turn to go in, and the school hut turns out to be a cabinet of wonders. I relax a little as everyone stares intently at the exhibits and nobody looks at me. The craft section comes first and includes a detailed model of a steam engine made from old food tins.
Bill smacks his lips appreciatively. “I’d like to meet the bloke that made this,” he says to nobody in particular.
There’s a model of a farm, and I bend down to study it carefully. The house is quite separate from the barn and stables, which I think is a stupid idea. I want to tell them how much more sensible it is to have them arranged around a courtyard.
There’s a model of industrial Glasgow and the harbor of Tel Aviv, and the greatest wonder of all—over a foot high and carved, so the notice says, out of soap—is a model of the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem. I marvel at their choices as well as their skill: Glasgow, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem. These men are citizens of the world while my life’s been so small and confined. But here we all are, together, all equally powerless.
We move on into a section for drawings and paintings. Many of these are comic cartoons, with jokes about camp life. Then we reach the back of a big crowd where the prisoners have halted, creating a bottleneck. A British soldier keeps saying, “Come on, you wankers, move on now. Other blokes deserve a op of ’em.”
I crane my head to see past the shoulders of the men in front, and eventually we shuffle forward till I can see two large charcoal drawings of nude women with long, flowing hair curling around their shoulders. The drawings show large breasts and luxuriant pubic hair, and I can’t help blushing as I look at them. Someone behind me groans and says, “That’ll keep your pecker up. If I had half an hour alone with her—” and someone else cuts in, “Half an hour? Three minutes, more like.” There’s loud laughter.
I glance at my companions. Ralph is gazing mistily, but he might be looking slightly to one side of the pictures. Max’s face is full of bitterness and anguish; these naked women are not bringing him joy. Bill’s eyes are almost popping out like in a cartoon. I am completely forgotten as he ogles the pictures, and I’m furiously jealous of these imaginary women with their cascading hair and balloon breasts. I want to shout to him, “Me, look at me!” Then I realize that Gee-gee Cousins would be gawping at them too, so I shove hands deep into my pockets, digging my nails into my palms, trying to master my anger, forcing myself to make a close study of the dots that make the nipples and the squiggles forming the pubic hair.
“Move on, son,” says the soldier-curator kindly. “Let the others have a turn. You can toss yourself off later.”
Bill taps my arm, and we turn and push our way through the crowd around the nudes. I want to ask him if pictures like that make his “pecker” stand up, and if he likes my small breasts as much as those large ones.
Out in the air again, I try to walk like a boy whose pecker has just been lifted, and wonder what that must feel like. How peculiar it would be to have a part of your body you can’t control, that jumps up of its own accord, and you can’t tell to lie down. I wouldn’t like that at all.
Max is silent on the way back to the hut, but Bill and Ralph discuss the things they’ve seen and laugh about the funny cartoons. Bill sighs over the nude drawings, and I want to smack him for thinking about them. Ralph sighs too, but I can’t help feeling he’s pretending as much as I am.
Close to our hut, Tucker falls in beside me and Bill, chatting about the drawings of the girls and rolling his cow eyes at me. He’s sauntering slowly, and by the time we reach the hut, the others are ahead of us, just out of hearing.
“And another thing,” Tucker says casually, as though he was still talking about the pictures, “I think it would be worth you giving me a little something from time to time, just to keep me mouth shut.”
Bill stops dead and looks around nervously. “What d’you mean?”
“Well, it’s hard to keep quiet when I’m so hungry, isn’t it? And a word in the ear of a goon might get me an extra parcel.”
We have stopped walking, and I look from Tucker to Bill, expecting Bill to say something, do something, but all he can manage is “You heard what Max said: They’d shoot her if they knew.”