Original fic: A Different Kind of Fighting
I've got this thing about the story-telling tradition, you see. And how our histories are made up of stories and if we don't tell them, we'll lose them. And once they're on their second or third generation re-telling we've already mislaid parts, shed them from our memories, so we have to fill in the gaps or learn new ways of telling the same story. Anyway. I'm trying to remember, for my sake and for my niece and nephew and whoever comes next. This is what happens:
The First World War he fought in. During the Second he had a daughter. It was a toss up which was more memorable, he said. And more difficult, come to that. The war he hated, but the little girl he loved so wide that sometimes it encircled and bound his chest, stopping his breath.
Back then they lived above the pub his father had owned before he drank himself into an early grave. The bombs fell on the twin cities, pub caught on the cusp between them in Everyman's land. They would hunker down in the cellar, three generations of women huddled beside him--mother, wife, babe-in-arms. The silvered barrels offered little comfort for seating or protection should a blast strike home, but the warm, malty air was comfort in its own right and they'd sing in the darkness until the all clear sounded, the baby's cry a toneless soprano to her mother's sweet alto.
Sometimes he'd tell stories of being a boy, tall for his age, with his first chin hairs sprouting weak and spindly like early spring shoots almost as soon as he turned fourteen. "Old enough to shave, old enough to drive," his father slurred, and handed him a slip of paper with an address on it and the keys to the family car. The engine screamed the first time he tried to put it in gear and he felt the pull of the lever against the grip of his hand. He fought against it, wrenching it into the right place, and it felt like a lesson learned.
"By, you're a young'un," said his first customer.
"They all say that. Just got one of those faces," he said, glancing at her in the mirror, her powdered cheeks settled between kind lines, hoping like hell she'd not notice he hadn't a clue how to find the hospital and was driving ever-increasing circles and hoping for a miracle.
"Saved the business," his mum said, laying her hand over his wrist, skin dry as paper even in the moist air of the beer cellar. "Poor Father, he was too shaky to drive. Such a shame."
Shame there'd been, right enough. But it wasn't the lack of driving that did it. More the steady drip, drip, drip of the pub's profits straight into his old man's mouth. It was water under the bridge now, of course. Beer and whiskey, too.
Two years he'd worked the taxi and helped his mother keep the pub ship-shape and Bristol fashion--though nearest he'd seen to sea was the Manchester Ship Canal. And in that time war came and swept up groups of lads in patriotic fervour, fast at first and then with more caution as the first walking-wounded came home and others never came home at all, crumpled telegraphs clutched in the hands of red-eyed customers the cue for him to pull out the special brandy. Stock ran at an all-time low.
"They're all going," he told her for the hundredth time. "Len and Jo and all the lads on the cricket team. They're all joining up. If I go now, I can be in the same regiment. It won't be so bad, see?"
She wiped the glass with a practised hand, setting it on the shelf above the bar, the slightest clink as it jostled with its neighbour for space. "I doubt Jo's joining up anything except for his best handwriting," she said, turning towards him. "He's only sixteen, same as you. You're too young, son. Our Tom's got his orders. Can't that be enough for now? Do you want to break your mother's heart? Do you want to be like Mary's Stanley staring into space and jumping at every footstep? She's taking in laundry to keep the kids fed, you know. He can't do a thing to help. Stop here and be grateful you've a roof over your head and a steady job."
He thought of those words later, when he was huddled between two comrades in a filthy trench somewhere in Belgium, rats making the most of their temporary playground. He'd been to the Lakes once, back when his dad had a steady hand and he and his two brothers were still in short trousers. It was nothing like the grey, dirty streets of home with the close-packed tenement buildings and the washing stringing the streets like the town was negotiating surrender to an unknown enemy. It had seemed like the whole world had opened up then, silver-blue lakes gathering at the feet of great hills that pushed up to the sky, carrying him with them. He'd thought he was on the edge of the universe, a mere hour or so up the A6 from home.
It had been foolish--a child's dream--to expect going away to war to be the same kind of adventure. He'd sold the recruiting officer a good enough lie and had hardly dared to take leave from his family in case they shopped him and he'd had his wings clipped before he'd stretched them even once. The training was simple and fast. Load guns, boys, fix bayonets, and for God's sake, keep your helmet on. No one had told him that a bayonet slides as easy into a body as it does into a sack of corn, but comes out harder. Much, much harder with gurgled screams and crimson blood pooling into the sodden earth, bent limbs of the fallen petty hillocks to be scrambled over to safety.
Two years he'd marched and dug and run and shot. And in that time he'd watched friends die, held men in his arms as they'd fought against Death like He, too, was wearing Kaiser Bill's helmet, spiked and arrogant and so bloody annoying. They'd lost so many, so fast, and he'd barely had time to become a man before he was promoted through the ranks, first Corporal, then Sergeant. He was eighteen. He knew his way around a taxi, a pub and a rifle. What did he know about leading men?
He took them over the top one day, following orders like a good soldier boy. It was summer and heat hung heavy in the air even early in the morning, mixed with the dust and powder from the suspended gunfire. There was the lightest touch of a breeze that should have shivered the leaves into their own brief action, but the tanks had been through and the artillery had done its job well and trees were a fading memory. He'd checked his pockets before he went up the ladder: ammo, Bible, matches, letter to his mother, cigar he'd bought off some fellow on the boat over and had been carrying with him since. It would be stale by now, but he was going to smoke it the day he survived this bloody war; whatever it tasted like it would be sweetened by relief and victory.
There was a ridge and the Captain crested it first, signalling them to follow. He came up it at a run, semi-blinded by the sun and the shots seemed to come from everywhere at once, lost in the noise of their own returning fire. He felt nothing at first, then a steady trickle down his side. No pain, though, and the adrenaline pumping through his veins kept him going, kept him pushing forward until they reached the machine gun nest, still smoking from the grenades the men had thrown. Good arms, most of them. Spin bowlers on the platoon's cricket team. Made a sergeant proud.
He dropped down, frantically pulling at his uniform, convinced it was almost too late, he'd drawn the short straw in today's lottery of the dead. He pushed his shirt aside, searching with fingers and half screwed-shut eyes for the entry wound only to find no blood. None at all. And instead of his skin pierced through and through with a jagged bullet hole, he found his water bottle, sad and deflated and no more use now than the stale cigar in his pocket.
"What is it, Sergeant?" asked the Captain as he doubled up with laughter, trying to put his uniform back to rights. "Are you quite well?"
"Quite," he choked out. "But I'm a bit thirsty. Got anything for that?"
He always said that was the day he knew he'd be coming home alive. Still, he didn't smoke the cigar until the ink was dry on the armistice paper. No need to tempt fate, after all.
"I thought my fighting days were over," he said. Upstairs the rusting bayonet lay tucked away in a drawer, weighed down with blankets and bad memories, pistol and medals both nestling by its side. "But it turns out living your life is just a different kind of fighting." He took his daughter in his arms and kissed her smooth forehead, running a thumb lightly across the long sweeps of eyelashes that curved across her cheeks. He thought of his mother, old and frail, yet still indomitable, refusing to let the years his father leached from her show in anything other than the odd grimace and hand clutching for brief support on standing. He thought of his pretty first wife with her ready laugh and a constitution that never matched the strength of her soul. He thought of his steady second wife, a comfort and a balm and the mother of the tiny child that owned him so completely. "On balance," he said, breathing in the heavy scent of home. "On balance, I'd say it's worth it."
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The First World War he fought in. During the Second he had a daughter. It was a toss up which was more memorable, he said. And more difficult, come to that. The war he hated, but the little girl he loved so wide that sometimes it encircled and bound his chest, stopping his breath.
Back then they lived above the pub his father had owned before he drank himself into an early grave. The bombs fell on the twin cities, pub caught on the cusp between them in Everyman's land. They would hunker down in the cellar, three generations of women huddled beside him--mother, wife, babe-in-arms. The silvered barrels offered little comfort for seating or protection should a blast strike home, but the warm, malty air was comfort in its own right and they'd sing in the darkness until the all clear sounded, the baby's cry a toneless soprano to her mother's sweet alto.
Sometimes he'd tell stories of being a boy, tall for his age, with his first chin hairs sprouting weak and spindly like early spring shoots almost as soon as he turned fourteen. "Old enough to shave, old enough to drive," his father slurred, and handed him a slip of paper with an address on it and the keys to the family car. The engine screamed the first time he tried to put it in gear and he felt the pull of the lever against the grip of his hand. He fought against it, wrenching it into the right place, and it felt like a lesson learned.
"By, you're a young'un," said his first customer.
"They all say that. Just got one of those faces," he said, glancing at her in the mirror, her powdered cheeks settled between kind lines, hoping like hell she'd not notice he hadn't a clue how to find the hospital and was driving ever-increasing circles and hoping for a miracle.
"Saved the business," his mum said, laying her hand over his wrist, skin dry as paper even in the moist air of the beer cellar. "Poor Father, he was too shaky to drive. Such a shame."
Shame there'd been, right enough. But it wasn't the lack of driving that did it. More the steady drip, drip, drip of the pub's profits straight into his old man's mouth. It was water under the bridge now, of course. Beer and whiskey, too.
Two years he'd worked the taxi and helped his mother keep the pub ship-shape and Bristol fashion--though nearest he'd seen to sea was the Manchester Ship Canal. And in that time war came and swept up groups of lads in patriotic fervour, fast at first and then with more caution as the first walking-wounded came home and others never came home at all, crumpled telegraphs clutched in the hands of red-eyed customers the cue for him to pull out the special brandy. Stock ran at an all-time low.
"They're all going," he told her for the hundredth time. "Len and Jo and all the lads on the cricket team. They're all joining up. If I go now, I can be in the same regiment. It won't be so bad, see?"
She wiped the glass with a practised hand, setting it on the shelf above the bar, the slightest clink as it jostled with its neighbour for space. "I doubt Jo's joining up anything except for his best handwriting," she said, turning towards him. "He's only sixteen, same as you. You're too young, son. Our Tom's got his orders. Can't that be enough for now? Do you want to break your mother's heart? Do you want to be like Mary's Stanley staring into space and jumping at every footstep? She's taking in laundry to keep the kids fed, you know. He can't do a thing to help. Stop here and be grateful you've a roof over your head and a steady job."
He thought of those words later, when he was huddled between two comrades in a filthy trench somewhere in Belgium, rats making the most of their temporary playground. He'd been to the Lakes once, back when his dad had a steady hand and he and his two brothers were still in short trousers. It was nothing like the grey, dirty streets of home with the close-packed tenement buildings and the washing stringing the streets like the town was negotiating surrender to an unknown enemy. It had seemed like the whole world had opened up then, silver-blue lakes gathering at the feet of great hills that pushed up to the sky, carrying him with them. He'd thought he was on the edge of the universe, a mere hour or so up the A6 from home.
It had been foolish--a child's dream--to expect going away to war to be the same kind of adventure. He'd sold the recruiting officer a good enough lie and had hardly dared to take leave from his family in case they shopped him and he'd had his wings clipped before he'd stretched them even once. The training was simple and fast. Load guns, boys, fix bayonets, and for God's sake, keep your helmet on. No one had told him that a bayonet slides as easy into a body as it does into a sack of corn, but comes out harder. Much, much harder with gurgled screams and crimson blood pooling into the sodden earth, bent limbs of the fallen petty hillocks to be scrambled over to safety.
Two years he'd marched and dug and run and shot. And in that time he'd watched friends die, held men in his arms as they'd fought against Death like He, too, was wearing Kaiser Bill's helmet, spiked and arrogant and so bloody annoying. They'd lost so many, so fast, and he'd barely had time to become a man before he was promoted through the ranks, first Corporal, then Sergeant. He was eighteen. He knew his way around a taxi, a pub and a rifle. What did he know about leading men?
He took them over the top one day, following orders like a good soldier boy. It was summer and heat hung heavy in the air even early in the morning, mixed with the dust and powder from the suspended gunfire. There was the lightest touch of a breeze that should have shivered the leaves into their own brief action, but the tanks had been through and the artillery had done its job well and trees were a fading memory. He'd checked his pockets before he went up the ladder: ammo, Bible, matches, letter to his mother, cigar he'd bought off some fellow on the boat over and had been carrying with him since. It would be stale by now, but he was going to smoke it the day he survived this bloody war; whatever it tasted like it would be sweetened by relief and victory.
There was a ridge and the Captain crested it first, signalling them to follow. He came up it at a run, semi-blinded by the sun and the shots seemed to come from everywhere at once, lost in the noise of their own returning fire. He felt nothing at first, then a steady trickle down his side. No pain, though, and the adrenaline pumping through his veins kept him going, kept him pushing forward until they reached the machine gun nest, still smoking from the grenades the men had thrown. Good arms, most of them. Spin bowlers on the platoon's cricket team. Made a sergeant proud.
He dropped down, frantically pulling at his uniform, convinced it was almost too late, he'd drawn the short straw in today's lottery of the dead. He pushed his shirt aside, searching with fingers and half screwed-shut eyes for the entry wound only to find no blood. None at all. And instead of his skin pierced through and through with a jagged bullet hole, he found his water bottle, sad and deflated and no more use now than the stale cigar in his pocket.
"What is it, Sergeant?" asked the Captain as he doubled up with laughter, trying to put his uniform back to rights. "Are you quite well?"
"Quite," he choked out. "But I'm a bit thirsty. Got anything for that?"
He always said that was the day he knew he'd be coming home alive. Still, he didn't smoke the cigar until the ink was dry on the armistice paper. No need to tempt fate, after all.
"I thought my fighting days were over," he said. Upstairs the rusting bayonet lay tucked away in a drawer, weighed down with blankets and bad memories, pistol and medals both nestling by its side. "But it turns out living your life is just a different kind of fighting." He took his daughter in his arms and kissed her smooth forehead, running a thumb lightly across the long sweeps of eyelashes that curved across her cheeks. He thought of his mother, old and frail, yet still indomitable, refusing to let the years his father leached from her show in anything other than the odd grimace and hand clutching for brief support on standing. He thought of his pretty first wife with her ready laugh and a constitution that never matched the strength of her soul. He thought of his steady second wife, a comfort and a balm and the mother of the tiny child that owned him so completely. "On balance," he said, breathing in the heavy scent of home. "On balance, I'd say it's worth it."
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