The '44 Vintage Read Online Free PDF Page A

away, the major’s medal ribbons had again caught his eye. Blue-red-blue, white-blue-white, and then faded red-white-blue—he knew them all, and they did leave him wiser, and not a little confused.
    The major was a proven soldier, they told him that, the first two of them—a fighting soldier for sure with that white-blue-white to prove it. But the faded red-white-blue, faded and fading off into each other, that also made him an old soldier, older even than he looked. For though Butler was no judge of age, and the older the more inaccurate, he knew a 1914-18 Victory Medal when he saw one. Both his father and the general had that one in their collections.
    It was strange how he could never think of either of them now without the other intruding almost immediately.
    No, “intruding” was the wrong word, he decided. They had become inseparable antagonists inside his head, just as they were in real life, but he could never make them act out of character there.
    Sometimes he had tried hard to imagine them arguing over him, about what he was resolved to do with his life. He had done—or tried to do—this not because he wanted it to happen (the very thought of it doing so was painful to him), but because it seemed to him that if he could eavesdrop into such a fantasy he might be able to understand better why he felt the way he did.
    But not even in his imagination could he make them say anything more to one another than he had heard them do in reality.
    The general would always speak first: “Good morning, Mr. Butler,” he would say politely, with just a touch of briskness, raising his bowler hat as he did so.
    “Good morning, sir,” his father would reply, just as politely, touching his cap in a gesture of recognition to the raised bowler.
    Other people would say “Sir Henry,” or occasionally “General,” but his father would never say more than “sir” and the general would never say less than “Mr.” which he rarely did for anyone else.
    For a long time this exchange of greetings had baffled young Butler. When the owner of Chesney and Rawle’s met the secretary of the Graphical Association union branch (and father of the Union Chapel at C & R) there should have been a certain wariness; when the president of the local Conservative Association met the chairman of the local Labour Party there ought to have been a clear antagonism; and when the man whose influence and organising ability had helped to break the General Strike in the town met the man who had been one of the strike’s leaders, there could only be bitterness. Butler himself had been not two years old then, and this December he would be twenty; but there were still men who wouldn’t talk to those they felt had betrayed them then, or at the most not a word more than was needed to get the job done.
    Yet when the General and his father met, there was neither wariness, nor antagonism, and not a hint of bitterness.
    It had been in Coronation Year—the year after he had won the scholarship—that he had caught a glimpse of the explanation.
    The year he had gone to work for the general.
    He had known without a word being said that his father expected him to take the paper round which had become vacant and which was his for the asking. And he had also known that although this was required of him as his proper contribution to the family income, they had in fact managed perfectly well since his mother’s death and its real purpose was “to keep his feet on the ground” (as Uncle Fred put it) now that he was a scholarship boy at the Grammar.
    But he had also known, above all, that he had not the slightest intention of taking the paper round. He didn’t like papers (or printing, for that matter), and he would sooner go kitting milk than delivering them. So when Mr. Harris the maths master had let slip that the general’s head gardener was in the market for a part-time boy, the nod was as good as a wink and he was off like a hare after the last lesson to the