Whistling for the Elephants Read Online Free PDF Page B

slightly green colour. It was
odd seeing Father drive a bus. I don’t believe he’d ever been on a bus in his
life. He sat rigid, driving on the right with disapproval, and never said a
word.
    I never
heard what happened to Lt Hutton. Gabriel made 4F (Physically Unfit for
Service) and wasn’t made to join up. Dirk reported for duty a week later on his
eighteenth birthday and was thrown into uniform. He ended up as a stores clerk
at a supply base in Santa Monica. Ten days in, he was killed when an unstable
consignment of baking powder collapsed on him in the warehouse. After that we
used to watch the news with a slightly different atmosphere in the house. Every
night Huntley and Brinkley would start by telling us how many Americans had now
been killed in action. I would feel sad for Dirk, while Father sat upright with
his gin and tonic. I couldn’t help feeling he saw them all as a bad lot and did
not mourn.
    Father
was coming to grips with America in his own way. Each night after dinner he
would spread a US map out on the dining-room table. He had blocked out the
names of all the states and he and I would sit trying to remember their names.
It was a British Empire attitude.
    That
which can be mapped can be ours. Within a week I could have made my way across
the Midwest blindfold, but it wasn’t enough. Once we had done the States we
moved on to county Ordnance Survey. Through the evenings Mother slept and my
fingers passed over new frontiers.
    I
carried on making my adjustments. I gave up ham sandwiches for lunch and moved
on to peanut butter with Welch’s grape jelly, marshmallow fluff and baloney
stuffed in a brown-paper bag. That part was easy. Mother never looked at what
we were buying anyway. I never drank someone else’s soda without wiping the
top off first, I put a peace symbol on a rainbow up on the inside of my locker
and I learned all the words to ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ by Peter, Paul and
Mary. I still didn’t have any friends. I tried hanging around my locker
between classes to see if anyone would bump into me. There was one girl who
looked hopeful. Connie Emerson. She was in my homeroom and I often caught her
looking at me. One day I was just turning my combination when she leaned on the
locker next to mine.
    ‘Hey,’
she said.
    ‘Hi,, I
responded, trying not to look too pleased. Cool, I needed to be cool.
    ‘Can I
ask you something?’
    ‘Sure.’
God, it was going so well.
    ‘The
others want to know if you’re a boy or a girl.’ I looked across the hall. A
small group of giggling girls were watching. I flushed.
    I
pulled my peaked cap low over my short hair. ‘Dorothy. My name is Dorothy.’
    ‘Yeah,
but the tie and everything. We thought you must really be a boy.’ Connie
collapsed into laughter and ran off with the others. I watched them run. Their
arms flailed out sideways and their legs looked all bendy. It was a hopeless
girly gait and somehow I knew I would never be able to run like that. I did
make one or two other friendship efforts after that but it was no use. I
thought about giving up the tie but before I had had time to make all the
necessary changes the summer vacation came and I didn’t know anyone. It was
only June. The unoccupied months stretched interminably ahead of me.
    Like a
colour-blind chameleon, I fumbled at adapting. Mother, however, refused to play
the game. As I let my accent grow as wide as the American continent itself,
hers shrank to a small town in Kent. She began making pinched little noises as
if she were simultaneously speaking and unwrapping toffees with her bottom. I
think everything was too big for her and so she withdrew further and further
from life. I suppose if she liked anything about America it was the ephemera.
She was particularly taken with the concept of the Dixie cup. A childhood in
the war had taught her never to throw anything away. She had spent a lifetime
hoarding and counting. Until the Dixie cup. It was a very American concept.