“Can I help you?” said the man behind the desk.
“The name’s Georgie Summerfield,” said Georgie. “I was told to come along to organize my transport.”
“You’re a new recruit, are you?”
“That’s right.”
The man behind the desk nodded but wore a very serious expression on his face. He glanced at the men on either side of him, who exchanged an amused look before shaking their heads and getting back to their ledgers.
“All right then, son,” said the man in the middle. “You’re new at all this, so I’ll assume that you don’t understand the way we do things around here. First things first: take the cigarette out of your mouth and put it out.”
Georgie stared at the man, and Alfie stared at Georgie. Something changed on his dad’s face—a sudden realization that life was different now than it had been a few days before. He did what he was told, tossing the cigarette onto the ground and crushing it beneath the heel of his boot. Alfie noticed a slight tremor in his hands as he did so.
“Now stand up straight and look ahead, there’s a good fellow. You’re not an animal in the jungle. Posture. At all times, posture.”
Georgie adjusted his stance, standing to his full height, shoulders back, eyes looking straight ahead. Beside him, Alfie did the same thing. His head came up to his dad’s waist.
“That’s better. Now let’s try this again, shall we? I think what you meant to say was, ‘Good afternoon, sir.’”
“Yes, sir,” said Georgie.
“Your name again?”
“Georgie Summerfield.”
The sergeant raised an eyebrow and put his pen back on the table, staring at Alfie’s dad with an irritated expression on his face.
“Georgie Summerfield, sir,” whispered Alfie.
“Georgie Summerfield, sir,” repeated Georgie in a quiet, resigned voice.
The sergeant nodded and leafed through a book, running his finger along a list of names. “Damley Road?” he asked, looking up.
“That’s right, sir.”
“You’re in luck, Summerfield. You’ve got a few days yet. Wednesday morning. Eight a.m. transport from Liverpool Street. Aldershot Barracks. Basic training for eight weeks. Bring this with you on the morning”—he handed a ticket across—“and you’ll see our lot soon enough on platform four. 14278, that’s your number. Don’t be late, there’s a good chap. We call that desertion.”
“Right you are, sir.”
The sergeant looked at Alfie. “And who’s this blighter, then?” he asked.
“That’s my boy, sir. Alfie.”
“Proud of your old man, are you, Alfie?” asked the sergeant, but Alfie didn’t say anything. “Well, you will be,” he went on, dismissing them both now. “One day.”
“I thought we came to look at the trains,” said Alfie when they were walking home.
“We did,” said Georgie.
“No we didn’t,” said Alfie, pulling his hand free of his dad’s as they walked along.
* * *
Now Alfie was back in King’s Cross for the first time since that day. He looked around, remembering where the sergeant had sat, but there were no desks there now, although the location of the ticket counters hadn’t changed. There were a lot of soldiers to be seen making their way across the concourse. Some were waiting in small groups beside the tea shop, their rucksacks on the ground beside them. Others were climbing down off trains and looking around for people they recognized. The rhythmic noise of the engines was as bad as ever—dead-Dad’s-dead-Dad’s-dead-Dad’s-dead—and Alfie wondered how the people who worked here could bear it.
He noticed one young Tommy standing in the center of a platform with a bag on his back and a deep red scar running down the side of his face. He was about twenty years old, Alfie thought, and had an expression on his face that was difficult to define; it was as if he’d been visited by a ghost but didn’t know how to tell anyone in case they locked him up and threw away the key. A moment later, two older people, a man and a woman—his parents, Alfie was certain of it—ran toward him, and when he saw them his rucksack fell off his back and his face collapsed. He looked as if he was about to fall over, but before he could, his mother and father were on either side of him, holding him up, and he was crying on their shoulders, great heavy sobs, as they wrapped him up between their bodies, protecting him from the world, rubbing his hair and whispering in his ears. When they started to walk away, the boy remained between them, and they stood as close as they could without all falling down in a muddle. The father’s arm was wrapped around his son’s shoulders; the mother’s clasped tight around the boy’s waist. Alfie watched them for a long time until he decided he shouldn’t stare like this, and then he turned away.
He looked around and was pleased to see that there were no other shoeshine boys in King’s Cross. Leonard Hopkins was long gone, and no one, it seemed, had come to take his place. He chose a point by a pillar that was equidistant from the ticket counter on his left and the platforms on his right and the tea shop in the corner, and sat down on the ground, opening Mr. Janáček’s box, taking out his brushes, cloths, daubers, and polishes, and closing the lid. He took his cap off his head and placed it upside down on the ground next to him before throwing the loose change from his pocket—three ha’pennies—into it to make it look like he’d already started. And then he looked up and shouted at the top of his voice:
“Shoeshine! Get your shoes shined here!”
* * *
Later that day, when he got home, he found Margie having a nap in the front parlor; she looked exhausted. He ran upstairs to his room and put the box in the back of his wardrobe before coming down to the kitchen and washing his hands with carbolic soap. When he was finished he gave them a sniff, but they still smelled of polish so he did it all over again. It wasn’t much better, but there was nothing he could do about it; they were as clean as he could get them for now. His back hurt a little from leaning over all day and the muscles in his arms were sore. There might have been a war going on, but there was still a surprising number of people who wanted their shoes to look good.
He looked around and felt his heart sink with what he saw. All the chairs were covered with Mrs. Gawdley-Smith’s pillowcases, and the line outside in the yard held her bedsheets and some funny-looking undergarments. Margie would never smell the polish on his hands after all. The place smelled too much like a laundry.
He found his mother’s purse in the handbag that was sitting in the corner and took it out, opening the clasp and looking inside. There wasn’t much money there. Reaching into his pocket, he took out all his earnings from the day and dropped most of them inside—enough money that she’d be pleased to find it there but not so much that she’d question where it had appeared from—before taking the rest back up to his bedroom, where he hid it in a box at the back of his sock drawer for a rainy day. Then he collapsed on his bed and closed his eyes.
It was still early evening, the sun was shining outside, but Alfie was asleep on top of his bed while Margie was snoring in the broken armchair in front of the fireplace.
It had never been like this before the war began.