“Granny Summerfield said we were finished, we were all finished,” said Alfie.
“And she wasn’t far wrong, was she? You want to listen to your granny, Alfie. Some of these old people, they know what’s going on. They’ve seen a thing or two.”
“She doesn’t like you very much,” said Alfie quietly.
“She used to. She doesn’t understand me, that’s all. She’s a good woman though, Alfie. She did a lot for me when I was a kid. She cleaned me up when … I mean, she looked out for me after…”
“After what?” asked Alfie.
“My old man used to knock me around something awful,” said Joe, looking down and moving his feet around slowly on the carpet. “Used to knock my old mum around too. Handy with his fists, he was. I was afraid of him, of course. My mum was afraid of him. You know the only person who wasn’t afraid of him?”
“Who?”
“Your Granny Summerfield,” said Joe. “She used to keep me hidden in her wardrobe when he was on the warpath. One time he practically broke down her front door looking for me on account of how I’d forgotten to clear out the muck from the back of the privy, and she took a rolling pin and stood before him, bold as brass, and said, ‘If you don’t get out of this house right now, Sam Patience, I’ll split your head in two. Do you hear me?’ And there was something about her that scared him because he left after that. She’s a tough old bat, I’ll give her that.”
Alfie tried to imagine it. Granny Summerfield facing down a bully!
“And then when I was your age,” continued Joe, “she got him to stop hitting us altogether.”
“How did she do that?”
“She organized half a dozen men from Damley Road and got them to call on my old man. Set him straight about a few things. Tell him what was what. I don’t know what they said to him, but he never laid a finger on my mum or me after that. And when he died—hit by a coal man’s wagon when he was reeling home, drunk—your granny made sure that my mum and me were taken care of. I know what she thinks of me now, Alfie—I see it in her face whenever she passes me on the street—but I owe that woman a lot. I just wish I could make her understand, that’s all.”
“She doesn’t like conchies,” said Alfie. “But then she didn’t want Dad to sign up when the war started either. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“Look, Alfie,” said Joe, putting his cigarette out and lighting another one. “I didn’t agree with what your dad was doing either. I thought he was mad. But I admired him for it. He wasn’t thinking about his own well-being. Of course, he wasn’t thinking about his family’s well-being either, but we’ll set that aside for now. Off he went, like so many of the men from around here. There was a fever to join up in 1914, Alfie, a fever. Everyone seemed to think it was just a lark. But at least he survived it. Look at Charlie Slipton from number twenty-one. He didn’t last long, did he?”
“He threw a stone at my head once for no reason whatsoever,” said Alfie, who couldn’t seem to let this go.
“Maybe he was aiming for something else and missed. Hit you by mistake. Anyway, when conscription came in in 1916 they said that every healthy man between the ages of eighteen and forty-one had to sign up, unless their wives were dead and they had a kid or two to take care of. No say in the matter at all! No right to your own opinion! But that’s where the conscientious objectors came in—the conchies, as they call us. There were lots of us, you know. Who stood up and refused to fight.”
“Were you afraid?” asked Alfie.
“Yes!” said Joe, leaning forward and looking the boy directly in the eyes. “Of course I was afraid. What kind of fool wouldn’t be afraid, going over to some foreign country to dig out trenches and to kill as many strangers as you could before some stranger could kill you? Only a lunatic wouldn’t be afraid. But it wasn’t fear that kept me from going, Alfie. It wasn’t because I knew I’d be injured or killed. It was the opposite of that. It was the fact that I didn’t want to kill anyone. I wasn’t put on this earth to murder my fellow man. I’d grown up with violence—can’t you see that? I can’t bear it. What my old man did to me … it broke something in my head, that’s all. If I went down the street now and hit a man on the head with a hammer, sent him to his Maker, then they’d put me in jail for it. They might even hang me. But because I wouldn’t go over to France and do the same thing, they put me in jail anyway. Where’s the justice in that, can you tell me? Where’s the sense?”
Alfie thought back to that long period when he hadn’t seen Joe Patience for almost two years. And then, when he had reappeared on Damley Road, he looked different. He looked older and sadder. And he had all these scars.
“So what happened to you?” asked Alfie.
“They brought me in,” said Joe with a shrug, looking away. “Put me on trial. Said I was a coward. I got sent to jail. It made a change from being given white feathers everywhere I went anyway.”
Alfie frowned. “White feathers?” he asked.
“That’s what they do. Women, mostly. Men just attack. Women, they hand out white feathers. To any young man they see who isn’t in a uniform. It means you’re a coward. It’s a rotten thing, Alfie, it really is. They come up to you on the street and they’re all smiles; they approach you like they’re your long-lost friend or some forgotten cousin or a girl you went to school with, or maybe they just like the look of you, and when you stop too they reach into their bag, they don’t say a word, and they pull a feather out and press it into your hands. And then they just walk away, bold as brass. They never even open their mouths. And everyone can see what they’re doing, the whole street. Everyone looks. They might as well take a hot iron and brand you a coward. It’s a horrible thing, Alfie, a horrible thing.”
Alfie remembered the young man whose shoes he’d shined before going to his brother’s funeral. He’d mentioned something about this. A woman came up to me in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.… Opened her handbag, and in front of everyone she … she …
“And jail?” said Alfie after a moment. “What was that like?”
“What do you think it was like?” asked Joe. “They put me in there because I wouldn’t fight, and then I spent more time fighting than I’d ever done before. The men inside, they went after me because of my beliefs. Not all of them, of course. There were other conchies there too, and we all got beatings at different times. You see this scar?” Joe indicated the deep ridge on his cheek and Alfie nodded. “That was the result of being inside. And this…” He pointed toward the burn on his head. “You don’t want to know how this happened or what they did to me. Anyway, when I got out, I didn’t know what to do. So I came home. The funny thing is, it’s not so bad anymore. You might have noticed I have a limp.” Alfie nodded; he had noticed. “Well, that came about when one of the inmates took against me. So now I limp and I have scars and I can walk from one side of London to the other without anyone giving me a white feather because they all think I was wounded over there. You know what that’s called, Alfie, don’t you?”