Out of the Blackout Read Online Free PDF Page A

guilt.
    He was conscious too that at the time there were many thingshe could have told the Cutheridges, could have told Mr Thurston and all the people who tried to find out who he was, but had deliberately not told them. Why had he kept silent? There was some strong influence—he did not know of what kind—from his former life telling him to: telling him not to reveal who he was, where he came from, how he had come to be on that train. But he felt there was another reason too: from the first moment he had loved the Cutheridges, had wanted to be with them, had opted for them rather than what he had left. He had loved them even as he deceived them.
    What was it he could have told them, had he wished?
    Simon was sitting on a tree stump on the edge of a little coppice. He was wearing a heavy sweater that his mother had knitted for him under a tweed sports jacket, but nevertheless he shivered. He gazed ahead of him, across the rolling fields towards Yeasdon. No—that was not the way to bring it back. He shut his eyes. At once he saw the door in Paddington—brown, with a split in the panel on the bottom left side, with the two steps up to it, and the sooty flowers to either side. Was this a memory of 1941, or of his experience earlier that year? Of 1941, surely. The door was brown, the panel was not seen from above.
    What pictures came to him from behind that door?
    He had no doubt that his mind had retained, for months or years after his arrival in Yeasdon, imprints of the reality behind that door, pictures of his first five years. Were they now entirely faded? He frowned. A figure. A large female figure in black . . . A man . . . something vaguely inimical about him, something hostile clinging to that vague impression . . . other shapes, mere outlines . . . all of them in the background, none of them attaining definition.
    Nothing more. Nothing of any solidity at all. No faces topping the figures. Nothing.
    â€˜I am Simon Cutheridge,’ he said to himself on his walk home. ‘you are also a boy who once lived at 17, Farrow Street,’ said that irritating voice, in counterpoint inside his head. ‘He isn’t Simon Cutheridge. He isn’t Simon Thorn either. Don’t you even want to know his name?’
    Simon’s best friend in Yeasdon was Micky Malone. Many people in the village found this odd. Micky had never had the slightest interest in anything academic. He could read wellenough, but his writing was atrocious. He had always had a passion for bikes and cars, and had been destined as sure as God made apples to be a garage mechanic, which was what he now was. Micky was genial, a humorist, and dubiously honest. He was stocky and pug-faced, where Simon had a sort of adolescent elegance and a long face that was not handsome, but gave promise of distinction. Micky was direct and outgoing, where Simon used politeness and manner as a guard. The boys from Yeasdon who had passed the eleven-plus had gone on to the Buckridge Grammar School, and had kept themselves rather aloof from those who had failed it and had gone on to the little secondary school in Yeasdon. Yet, in spite of all this, Simon’s best friend had been Micky Malone, idling away the years before he could leave school at fourteen, grasping joyously at the opportunities for easy pleasures in the years since then.
    Presumably the reason was that Micky had also been an evacuee. All the other children—some very soon, some at the end of the war—had gone home, but not Micky or Simon. After Micky had come to Yeasdon his mother had paid him one visit, in 1943. She wore her hair in a headscarf, swore like a trooper, and within ten minutes of her arrival demanded to know where the bookmaker’s was. When the war ended nothing was heard of her. Micky’s adoptive mother hoped she’d gone off with a Yank, though that seemed rather a poor return for helping us to save the free world.