Her idea of parenting was to bend my will to hers, but I’d always been a match for her. When I was small, I decided I wouldn’t eat rabbit. I clamped my lips tight and refused the meal she’d cooked. So she brought out the same plate of stew for meal after meal and refused me any other food, saying, “You can’t be hungry if you won’t eat that.” I ate nothing for days, until I was light-headed with hunger. When she clattered the rabbit stew plate in front of me for breakfast on the third day, it had started to grow a fine furring of mold. Then my father stepped in, as I knew he would, giving the stew to the pig and telling my mother, “She’s just like you.” Later, she always gave me a plate of boiled turnips when the family had rabbit stew, even after I’d told her I liked it now.
But she was right about the lack of boys. There wasn’t one over the age of fourteen for miles around. The tiny handful of Czech speakers had run away to join the resistance like my dad and Jan, but the German-speaking majority had volunteered for the Nazi army or gone to work in factories across the Reich. Many of the girls I’d known at school had gone too, and of those who stayed, Matylda and Dagmar were rumored to give themselves freely to the soldiers who were billeted nearby. At least their lives were moving on, while mine was caught like a fly in amber, an unchanged daily routine since I was fifteen. Five long years when I should have been discovering so many new things, but instead my world had narrowed down to just this farm and house, punctuated only by occasional trips to market or to church. A life that chafed like outgrown shoes.
“You worked hard too,” she said, now trying to make it up to me.
I smiled grudgingly. “And you.”
When had a day ever passed that she didn’t work hard? What else was there in her life apart from work?
After our meal, I slipped to my room and took down the dusty English reader I’d had at school, opened it at page one and applied myself with absolute concentration. My mother’s life wasn’t going to be mine. I would make sure of that.
Two
When his work party was unloaded at the farm in Vražné that morning, Bill felt a tingle in the back of his head, as though something important was going to happen. For the past five years, he’d had the repeated sensation that his world was alternately expanding and shrinking, expanding and shrinking, as if he lived within the rib cage of some live, breathing creature. And this morning, it was about to expand.
He glanced at his mate Harry, but he was yawning and scratching, oblivious to anything special about the day. It had been an early start, and there was another day’s hard labor ahead of them. The only thing Bill could see that was different today was that they had the old guard with them, as well as a smartly dressed captain. Usually they were just dumped at the day’s workplace: a forest clearing, the roadworks, a farm, and left under the eye of some zealous, gun-waving, Nazi-supporting local man. Bill wondered what was so special about this farm that it required two soldiers.
The kitchen door opened, and he smiled. A shapely woman in her mid-forties stepped out, with clogs and dingy skirts and her hair in a scarf, but an air of imperious elegance, as though she was attending a ball. Bill thought, Ah, that’s why they’re here. They ain’t watchin’ us at all.
A moment later, a girl half her age emerged, and leaned casually against the doorpost as if completely unaware of the effect she was having on these woman-starved young men. If the mother was attractive, the girl was an oasis in a desert. Bill felt Harry straighten up beside him, and he pulled his own shoulders back. The girl’s eyes ranged over them, assessing, sizing them up. She had black curls, eyes like a cat, and a body as lithe and slim as her mother’s was rounded and womanly. Bill held her stare, and the walls of the farmyard seemed to move back.
He’d felt this world expansion before. First of all, back in 1939, when he had been eighteen and his Sunday league football team had downed too many pints after a game and dared one another to join up for the army. He’d hardly been aware then that he was signing away any control over his own life for an indeterminate period, hardly realized that from now on somebody else would tell him where to be, what to wear, what to eat, when to go to sleep and when to wake up, who to kill. But marching to the training camp, he realized his life was no longer going to be confined to the Stoke Newington pub where he’d grown up, the familiar London commute to his job at Paddington Station and home to practice his saxophone or play the piano in the bar in the evening.
After their basic training, his world expanded again as he mounted the gangplank of the ship at Portsmouth to an unknown wartime destination, stepping out into a life full of possibilities and dangers, including the new sensations of seasickness and homesickness. He longed to see his mother, his cousin Flora, even his boss in the ticket office. He missed the piano keys that had been like extensions of his own fingers, part of his body, for as long as he could remember. He suffered the boredom of the high seas, where there was no entertainment but endless card games on the long voyage around South Africa and up the Suez Canal. On some days he played his harmonica for singsongs. He saw Table Mountain as they rounded the Cape, and eventually he felt the gritty sand of a desert under his boots.
His battalion pitched their tents in the freezing-cold dark, and in the morning, when Bill flicked back the tent flap, there was a bloody great pyramid.
“I think we’re in Egypt,” he said over his shoulder.
“They better have tea in the NAAFI,” replied Harry.
But Bill wasn’t interested in tea; he couldn’t wait to climb the pyramid, and stood at the top with his arms thrown wide, looking out over a world grown so much bigger than he could have imagined.
That night Harry set off with some of the lads for the local brothels, but Bill refused to join them. “Don’t come crying to me when you’ve got the clap,” he warned. Instead he made do with memories of the girls back home and wandered the bazaars and streets, soaking up the strangeness, tingling with the excitement of it.
• • •
Bill’s world continued to expand and then to contract, from the glittering wonders of Cairo to the sweaty, suffocating confined space inside a tank lumbering across the sands for days on end. The gunners took turns to stand in the turret for some fresh air. They became irritable with each other, squeezed together in a metal box under the roasting sun, a metal box that might be their coffin. On Harry’s twenty-first birthday, they opened a tin of corned beef, and it was so hot in the tank that the meat ran out as liquid. They suffered mind-numbing boredom, roasted all day and shivered all night, until suddenly they were in the terror and earsplitting din of battle, with shells exploding all around them, exposed as a row of ducks at a fairground shooting gallery.
He and Harry had been through it all together, like a couple of bookends: blond Bill at one end of the shelf and Harry with his wavy brown hair at the other. Girls couldn’t resist Harry’s half-closed, sleepy eyes, while men of a certain kind were drawn to Bill’s prettiness, and more than once Harry had to put them straight. It was more than any peacetime friendship. Bill had seen the horrors Harry saw; Harry had felt Bill’s terror. They trusted each other implicitly, watched each other’s backs, shared each other’s food. They had their disagreements, of course, and often drove each other mad, but each knew the other would sling him over his back and carry him off a battlefield until he couldn’t walk a step farther. Brothers-in-arms.