A Soldier's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

world.
    His mother was a big-boned, florid, fair woman and his father some nameless soldier from the big camp outside Blandford. He lived with Mum in the back room of the estate cottage, with his granny and grandad. Little and bent, skilled in all kinds of farm-work, ploughman, cowman, hedger, thatcher,his grandad had taught him to use his hands. He was kind and firm with the little boy in a detached way, just as he was with animals. He sometimes suffered from tremendous silent rages which he took out on inanimate objects, working furiously with spade or bill-hook.
    Granny was big and florid like her daughter, but in all other ways different, placid where the younger woman was passionate, a chapel-goer and a bible-reader. He had good reason to remember them both for they brought him up when Mum left. To take up a good post in service, so she said, and send money home for him. Soon the memory of her faded, except that he would still wake up at night in the back bedroom, almost believing that he could hear a woman sighing in the dark. He went to the village school where he learnt to read and write and figure. During holidays he rambled about with other boys or went out to take Grandad his snack in the fields. He might sit with him contentedly, in semi-silence. The old man spoke little but enjoyed showing him things—how to plait horsehair into a rabbit-snare, or weave a wattle fence, or carve clothes-pegs. Or how to read the warning cries of birds, or smell rain coming, or take direction by the stars at night.
    His mother had faded into a distant and ratherpleasant memory when one day, unexpectedly, he came home from school and saw the big yellow car standing in the lane near the cottage. A jolly fat man in bright check tweeds like a checker-board sat at the wheel smoking a big cigar. The boy Saul squinted up at him in the bright sunlight and wrinkled his nose at the cigar smoke. The fat man laughed and winked at him, the cigar poised in the air.
    And there was his Mum in the front parlour and she was old. She was wearing a silly short pink dress which, as even he knew, was too tight for her, and a silly little tight hat and her face was baggy and powdered. She flung her arms round him and hugged him in one of her moods of fierce demonstrative affection. He pulled away and stared at her. And wasn’t he a boy, so big and strong, and Gran had taken real good care, hadn’t she, like her very own, which he was, and wasn’t the country good for him, of course it was, town was no good for kids, though of course there was another side to it. Then there were the presents, a box of Britains’ tin soldiers, Black Watch in kilts and topees with a piper, and a field-gun that fired caps, and a picture book of Robinson Crusoe, and a tin of Mackintosh’s toffee. She dabbed her eyes with a small handkerchief as she told them how she’d found a good man and how they’d marry when hemade certain financial arrangements and live in a nice house out in the country, somewhere near Epping perhaps, and then they could be all together there.
    She swept him up in her arms again, breathing patchouli, then went out to the car. The fat man winked and saluted with his cigar, while Mum got into the yellow car still dabbing at her eyes. Granny and Saul watched and waved as the car roared down the lane and vanished in clouds of dust. He kept the presents carefully in a box under his bed, but she never came back. Grandad had more of his silent spells of frenzied work and began to drink, just sometimes.
    When he was twelve he left school and went to work in the fields, where he began to come into his strength. A few years later Grandad began to grow old and careless, till one day he pitched down off a rick he was building and broke his back. They carried him to the cottage on a hurdle covered with horse blankets, and the doctor came but couldn’t do much. The old man lingered on for a few days in his bed, silent as usual. Saul