by John Boyne
“Shoeshine, please,” said the man.
Alfie nodded and sat up straight, arranging his materials once again as the man sat down and put his foot on the footrest. “I remember you, don’t I?” he asked. “You were here last week.”
“I’m here every week, sir,” said Alfie. “The name’s Alfie.”
“Dr. Ridgewell,” said the man.
“Are you a soldier, sir?”
“Of a sort. I was a consultant physician before the war. Now I work in an army hospital.”
“I’d like to be a doctor someday,” said Alfie, even though he had no interest at all in being a doctor. But he knew that grown-ups liked it when boys his age pretended to be interested in their jobs.
“Is that right?” Dr. Ridgewell asked, looking pleased. “Well, I suppose everyone has to start somewhere. Believe it or not, I used to earn my pocket money by making deliveries for our local fishmonger every Saturday. Of course, I was fortunate. My father was a doctor too. As was his before him. But there’s a chap at the hospital, Dr. Morehampton, and his father was a coal man, if you can believe it. And another, Dr. Sharpely, who’s the son of a greengrocer. So it takes all sorts, I suppose. What does your father do?”
“He’s in the army.”
“Well, of course he is. Quite right too. But what did he do before that?”
“He worked at the dairy down Damley Road,” said Alfie. “He drove a milk float.”
“A good honest job,” said Dr. Ridgewell, nodding, satisfied by the response. “And I dare say he’ll be back at it soon. This war will be over by Christmas, you know. There’s no doubt about it now.”
Alfie said nothing.
“What sort of doctor are you?” he asked after a little while, finishing one shoe and switching over to the other.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you look after people if they have a cold? Or if they’ve broken their leg?”
“It’s quite complicated,” said Dr. Ridgewell. “Are you sure you want to know?” Alfie nodded. “All right then. I deal with the medicine of the mind. Chaps who’ve gone a bit doolally, if you know what I mean. Fellows who aren’t playing with a full deck anymore. Men who can’t see the wood for the trees. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“I can’t say I do,” said Alfie, having no idea what any of that meant.
“Mad men,” explained Dr. Ridgewell. “You know what it is to go mad, don’t you?”
“Yes. Sometimes I think I might be going that way myself.”
“Well then, you know what I’m talking about. I look after those whose minds have gone a bit befuddled.” He tapped the side of his head with his fingers. “There’s a lot of it about these days, of course. These chaps who come back from the trenches. The ones who come back alive, I mean. It’s not easy for them, you see. They’ve seen a lot of terrible things, experienced an awful lot of trauma. It can play havoc with the old reasoning functions.”
“And what happens to them?” asked Alfie, stopping his polishing now and looking up.
“Differs from man to man,” replied Dr. Ridgewell. “Some can’t get out of it at all. It’s too early to say, of course, but there are some who are probably lost for life. Others might take years to recover. Some just need a good talking to in order to pull them back to their senses. As I say, it differs from man to man. There’s no hard-and-fast rule.”
“Does anyone die?” asked Alfie, frowning.
“Oh dear me, no,” said Dr. Ridgewell. “It’s not that sort of disease, you see. Although I suppose there are some who might say it’s a living death. Chaps who’ve gone through so much bombing and shelling and shooting and witnessed so many terrible things that their minds just pack up on them and say to their owners, ‘You go your way and I’ll go mine.’ It’s a rotten business. But anyway, that’s what I do. I try to put these fellows back together again. How are we getting along there? All finished?”
Alfie nodded and took his dusters away. “As good as new,” he said.
“Capital job too,” said Dr. Ridgewell. “You really are very good at this, you know. If you decide to go into medicine someday it’ll be a great loss to the shoeshining business!” He stood up and threw a penny into Alfie’s cap. “Well, good-bye for now. See you next week, I expect.”
Yes, thought Alfie as he walked away.
Perhaps.
CHAPTER 10
HUSH, HERE COMES A WHIZBANG
The green paint on the front door was beginning to crack, and Alfie could make out scars of red peeping through from underneath. He stood before it nervously, uncertain whether or not this was a good idea, but before he could decide, the door opened and there he was, standing before him. Joe Patience. The conchie from number sixteen.
“Alfie,” he said in surprise. “I thought I heard someone out here. I was starting to get worried. I’m glad it’s only you.” He looked outside for a moment, glancing up and down the street to make sure that no one else was there, before stepping back into the hallway.
“Hello, Mr. Patience,” said Alfie.
“Mr. Patience? It’s Joe, you know that. What brings you here anyway? It’s a long time since you came knocking on my door.”
“I wanted to ask you something. I need your help.”
Joe raised an eyebrow. The bruising around his eye had got a little better over the last few days; the different colors had settled into a single shade of light blue and it didn’t look as tender as before.
“I didn’t know who else to ask,” continued Alfie. “I’m on a secret mission, you see. Well, I was on a secret mission, but now I’m on another one.”
Joe frowned and seemed uncertain what he should do, but finally he stepped aside and ushered Alfie in. “Well, you’d better come in, I suppose,” he said. “I don’t like leaving my front door open for too long anyway.”
It had always seemed strange to Alfie that whenever we went into anyone else’s house on Damley Road it felt like being in his own home, only there were so many subtle differences. The rooms were all the same shapes and sizes, the corridors all led in the same directions—or in the mirror images of those directions—but while he was familiar with every stick of furniture in his own house and everything that he, his mother, and his father owned—their ornaments, their knickknacks, their cushions—the things he saw in other people’s homes were completely alien to him.
He looked around now, and the first thing he noticed about Joe Patience’s living room was the number of books on display. The walls were lined with shelves and every spare space was taken up with hard-covered volumes, some in languages that Alfie didn’t even understand. Joe saw the way Alfie was staring around in amazement, his mouth hanging open, and smiled.
“Are you a reader, Alfie?” he asked.
“I like Robinson Crusoe,” he replied. “Mr. Janáček gave me a copy for my fifth birthday. I couldn’t read it very well then, but I’ve read it three times since. It’s the best book ever written.”
“It’s a good book, certainly,” said Joe Patience. “But until you’ve read a lot more, you should reserve judgment. What other books have you read?”
Alfie shook his head. “Just storybooks at school. None of them are as good as Robinson Crusoe. Have you read all these books?” he asked, wondering how many there were. He leaned back and looked down the corridor, which was also lined with books on both walls, and into the kitchen, where he could see another row above the range. Joe’s clarinet was propped up against the kitchen table. He used to play it outside, of course, before the war. The whole street could hear him. Now he only ever played indoors, in private.
“Most of them. There’s not much else for me to do these days. Now, are you going to tell me what you’re doing here or do I have to guess?”
Alfie stared at Joe, wondering how best to phrase this. He was only the same age as Georgie—thirty-one—but he looked much older. He had heavy bags under his eyes, maybe from reading too much, maybe from a lack of sleep, and a scar running along one
of his cheeks. Above his left temple was a piece of very smooth skin where his hair didn’t grow. It looked as if he’d been burned badly.
“You know my dad,” said Alfie finally.
“Of course I do,” replied Joe with a quick laugh. “We grew up together. You know that.”
“And you know the war?”
Joe paused for a moment but then nodded. “I do,” he repeated.
“Well, when my dad went to the war we used to get letters from him all the time, and it seemed like he was having a great time,” said Alfie, feeling the words start to pour out of him now, tumbling over each other as he tried to tell Joe everything he knew. “Only then the letters stopped coming, or I thought they stopped coming, but actually Mum was keeping them to herself and not letting me see them, but I found them anyway—she kept them under her mattress—and I read them and they didn’t make a lot of sense, most of them; or they did at the start, when he was telling us about all the terrible things that were happening, but then after a while he stopped talking about those things and everything just got confused.”
“Slow down, slow down,” said Joe, holding a hand up in the air. “Your dad went to the war, I got that part. If you’re worried that he hasn’t been in touch—well, the soldiers can’t always write. They’re fighting, of course, and—”
“My dad’s not fighting,” said Alfie, shaking his head.
“He’s not?” asked Joe, turning his head away, and Alfie gasped in surprise.
“You know, don’t you?” he asked. “You know about my dad!”
“Know what?”
“You know!”
“Alfie, you’re not making any sense.”
“My dad’s in hospital. A couple of hours from here. He’s been there for … well, I don’t know how long.”
“Ah,” said Joe Patience.
“Only I’m not supposed to know that.”
“So how did you find out?”
“I’m clever,” said Alfie. “I worked it out. But you knew, didn’t you? I can see it in your face.”
Joe nodded his head. “I did, yes,” he said. “Well, have you been to see him, Alfie?”
“Yes.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“Eventually. But it wasn’t like it was before. He knew me, and then he didn’t know me. And then the nurses came out so I had to scamper. But before I did, he shouted something out. The nurses didn’t pay any attention, but I did. I heard that word, and I know he was shouting it to me.”
“What did he say?” asked Joe.
“Home.”
Joe raised an eyebrow, then reached for his cigarettes and lit one up. Alfie had noticed that whenever grown-ups wanted a good think, that’s what they did. They reached for the tobacco and their matches.
“Have you been to see him?” asked Alfie after a moment.
Joe nodded, taking a long drag from his cigarette. “I’ve been once a week, every week,” he said. “Well, since I got out of prison, that is.”
“Why did you never tell me?”
“Your mum asked me not to. But I suppose since you know now, there’s no point lying about it. What does Margie say about all this?”
“She doesn’t know,” admitted Alfie. “I haven’t told her.”
Joe nodded; this didn’t seem to surprise him in the least.
“Can I ask you something?” asked Alfie after a long silence.
“Sure,” said Joe with a shrug. “Ask me anything you want.”
“Why do they call you the conchie from number sixteen?”
Joe frowned. “Because that’s where I live,” he said.
“No,” said Alfie, shaking his head. “I understand that part. It’s the first bit I don’t get. What’s a conchie?”
Joe smiled a little. “You don’t know what the word means?”
“No.”
Joe nodded. “It’s not really a word,” he said. “It’s a shortened version of a word. Like Old Bill Hemperton, everyone calls him Bill but his real name is William. Or like saying kids instead of children.”
“So what’s conchie short for, then?” asked Alfie.
“Conscientious objector,” said Joe. “It means someone who doesn’t want to fight in the war for humanitarian, religious, or political reasons.”
Alfie frowned and stared down at the carpet, noticing the loops of the pattern and how they intersected with each other. There were a lot of words in that sentence that he didn’t understand. He looked up, puzzled.
“At the start,” explained Joe, “before conscription, men signed up of their own accord. To fight, I mean. Your dad signed up that first day, remember?” Alfie nodded. “I can see him now, walking down Damley Road in his uniform, looking pleased as punch with himself. I was outside washing my windows. ‘Georgie,’ I said. ‘You’ve not gone and signed up, have you? Tell me you haven’t.’
“‘Fighting for king and country, aren’t I?’ he told me.
“‘For what? What’s the king ever done for you?’
“‘Nothing so you’d notice. But a man’s gotta do…’ and all that rubbish.
“I remember staring at him, Alfie, as if he’d lost his mind. Lost control of his reason entirely. ‘You must be mad,’ I told him.
“‘You say that now, Joe, but your time will come. Watch, you’ll have signed up too by the end of the week.’
“‘Pigs will be flying over the Houses of Parliament when that day comes, Georgie,’ I told him. ‘I’m not signing up to go killing people. What have the Germans ever done to me anyway? Nothing so as you’d notice.’
“But your dad just laughed and shook his head and said my time would come. I watched him as he went into your house, and I wondered what was going on in there. What your mum thought. What you thought.”
“Granny Summerfield said we were finished, we were all finished,” said Alfie.
“And she wasn’t far wrong, was she? You want to listen to your granny, Alfie. Some of these old people, they know what’s going on. They’ve seen a thing or two.”
“She doesn’t like you very much,” said Alfie quietly.
“She used to. She doesn’t understand me, that’s all. She’s a good woman though, Alfie. She did a lot for me when I was a kid. She cleaned me up when … I mean, she looked out for me after…”
“After what?” asked Alfie.
“My old man used to knock me around something awful,” said Joe, looking down and moving his feet around slowly on the carpet. “Used to knock my old mum around too. Handy with his fists, he was. I was afraid of him, of course. My mum was afraid of him. You know the only person who wasn’t afraid of him?”
“Who?”
“Your Granny Summerfield,” said Joe. “She used to keep me hidden in her wardrobe when he was on the warpath. One time he practically broke down her front door looking for me on account of how I’d forgotten to clear out the muck from the back of the privy, and she took a rolling pin and stood before him, bold as brass, and said, ‘If you don’t get out of this house right now, Sam Patience, I’ll split your head in two. Do you hear me?’ And there was something about her that scared him because he left after that. She’s a tough old bat, I’ll give her that.”
Alfie tried to imagine it. Granny Summerfield facing down a bully!
“And then when I was your age,” continued Joe, “she got him to stop hitting us altogether.”
“How did she do that?”
“She organized half a dozen men from Damley Road and got them to call on my old man. Set him straight about a few things. Tell him what was what. I don’t know what they said to him, but he never laid a finger on my mum or me after that. And when he died—hit by a coal man’s wagon when he was reeling home, drunk—your granny made sure that my mum and me were taken care of. I know what she thinks of me now, Alfie—I see it in her face whenever she passes me on the street—but I owe that woman a lot. I just wish I could make her understand, that’s all.”
“She doesn’t like conchies,” said Alf
ie. “But then she didn’t want Dad to sign up when the war started either. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“Look, Alfie,” said Joe, putting his cigarette out and lighting another one. “I didn’t agree with what your dad was doing either. I thought he was mad. But I admired him for it. He wasn’t thinking about his own well-being. Of course, he wasn’t thinking about his family’s well-being either, but we’ll set that aside for now. Off he went, like so many of the men from around here. There was a fever to join up in 1914, Alfie, a fever. Everyone seemed to think it was just a lark. But at least he survived it. Look at Charlie Slipton from number twenty-one. He didn’t last long, did he?”
“He threw a stone at my head once for no reason whatsoever,” said Alfie, who couldn’t seem to let this go.
“Maybe he was aiming for something else and missed. Hit you by mistake. Anyway, when conscription came in in 1916 they said that every healthy man between the ages of eighteen and forty-one had to sign up, unless their wives were dead and they had a kid or two to take care of. No say in the matter at all! No right to your own opinion! But that’s where the conscientious objectors came in—the conchies, as they call us. There were lots of us, you know. Who stood up and refused to fight.”
“Were you afraid?” asked Alfie.
“Yes!” said Joe, leaning forward and looking the boy directly in the eyes. “Of course I was afraid. What kind of fool wouldn’t be afraid, going over to some foreign country to dig out trenches and to kill as many strangers as you could before some stranger could kill you? Only a lunatic wouldn’t be afraid. But it wasn’t fear that kept me from going, Alfie. It wasn’t because I knew I’d be injured or killed. It was the opposite of that. It was the fact that I didn’t want to kill anyone. I wasn’t put on this earth to murder my fellow man. I’d grown up with violence—can’t you see that? I can’t bear it. What my old man did to me … it broke something in my head, that’s all. If I went down the street now and hit a man on the head with a hammer, sent him to his Maker, then they’d put me in jail for it. They might even hang me. But because I wouldn’t go over to France and do the same thing, they put me in jail anyway. Where’s the justice in that, can you tell me? Where’s the sense?”