by John Boyne
Alfie thought back to that long period when he hadn’t seen Joe Patience for almost two years. And then, when he had reappeared on Damley Road, he looked different. He looked older and sadder. And he had all these scars.
“So what happened to you?” asked Alfie.
“They brought me in,” said Joe with a shrug, looking away. “Put me on trial. Said I was a coward. I got sent to jail. It made a change from being given white feathers everywhere I went anyway.”
Alfie frowned. “White feathers?” he asked.
“That’s what they do. Women, mostly. Men just attack. Women, they hand out white feathers. To any young man they see who isn’t in a uniform. It means you’re a coward. It’s a rotten thing, Alfie, it really is. They come up to you on the street and they’re all smiles; they approach you like they’re your long-lost friend or some forgotten cousin or a girl you went to school with, or maybe they just like the look of you, and when you stop too they reach into their bag, they don’t say a word, and they pull a feather out and press it into your hands. And then they just walk away, bold as brass. They never even open their mouths. And everyone can see what they’re doing, the whole street. Everyone looks. They might as well take a hot iron and brand you a coward. It’s a horrible thing, Alfie, a horrible thing.”
Alfie remembered the young man whose shoes he’d shined before going to his brother’s funeral. He’d mentioned something about this. A woman came up to me in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.… Opened her handbag, and in front of everyone she … she …
“And jail?” said Alfie after a moment. “What was that like?”
“What do you think it was like?” asked Joe. “They put me in there because I wouldn’t fight, and then I spent more time fighting than I’d ever done before. The men inside, they went after me because of my beliefs. Not all of them, of course. There were other conchies there too, and we all got beatings at different times. You see this scar?” Joe indicated the deep ridge on his cheek and Alfie nodded. “That was the result of being inside. And this…” He pointed toward the burn on his head. “You don’t want to know how this happened or what they did to me. Anyway, when I got out, I didn’t know what to do. So I came home. The funny thing is, it’s not so bad anymore. You might have noticed I have a limp.” Alfie nodded; he had noticed. “Well, that came about when one of the inmates took against me. So now I limp and I have scars and I can walk from one side of London to the other without anyone giving me a white feather because they all think I was wounded over there. You know what that’s called, Alfie, don’t you?”
Alfie shook his head.
“Irony,” replied Joe, smiling a little but not looking very happy as he did so. “That’s what they call irony. Read something other than Robinson Crusoe and you’ll find that word pops up from time to time.”
“And the bruises on your face?” asked Alfie. “The recent ones?”
“My own fault,” said Joe with a bitter smile. “I shouldn’t open my door at night. The drunks. They come after the pubs close.”
Alfie thought about this long and hard. He could hear himself breathing through his nose as he considered everything that Joe had told him, and through all this, Joe said nothing, just waited for him to speak.
“Don’t you want to leave here?” said Alfie finally. “People have been so horrible to you. Don’t you want to go somewhere else?”
“Where would I go? This is my home.”
“Somewhere you could start again. You could get married, have children of your own.”
Joe smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think any woman would put up with me.”
“Why not? I read in the papers that all the girls are looking for husbands now. There’s a death of young men in London now, that’s what they say.”
“A dearth,” said Joe.
“And Helena Morris was sweet on you, everyone knows that. You could marry her.”
“I’d rather bore a hole to the center of the earth with my tongue,” said Joe, tapping a hand on his knee and looking anxious. “Some men were built for sweethearts, Alfie. Like your dad. I remember when he met your mum. I never saw a man so much in love! And she fell for him too. It was all so easy. So unfair. Some of us … well, we don’t get that kind of luck.”
“Do you think my dad was wrong?” asked Alfie, uncertain what Joe was talking about but sure that it had something to do with the beliefs that had got him in so much trouble. “To go to the war, I mean? Do you think he should have stayed at home and been a conchie like you?”
Joe Patience shook his head. “I don’t tell other people what to do,” he said. “I don’t tell them what they should think and what they shouldn’t think. I just live my own life. Your dad is a brave man, and he did what he thought was right. But I’m a brave man too. You might not believe that, Alfie, and those women in Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus and strolling down Regent Street like they understand something about bravery might not believe it. But I am.”
“I want to bring him home,” said Alfie.
“Bring who home?”
“My dad.”
Joe frowned. “But he’s in the hospital.”
“He’s not getting any better there. And it’s a terrible place. It stinks and there’s blood everywhere and all the patients are crying or going mad. I can’t leave him there. If I bring him home, then Mum and me can help him get better. We’ll fix him instead.”
Joe walked over to the window and looked out at the street. Mrs. Milchin from number seven was walking by, and as she passed Joe’s door she spat at it.
“You need to speak to your mum about this,” said Joe finally.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“After I discovered him I came straight home to tell Mum,” said Alfie. “I thought perhaps she really believed that he was on a secret mission for the government. But that evening she’d already gone to the hospital for a night shift, and when she came back again, I was already asleep. And then, when she went to work the next day, I went to King’s Cross to shine shoes—”
“To do what?”
“To shine shoes,” he repeated. “I do that to help Mum out. There might be a war going on, but a lot of people want to have clean shoes. I’m doing my bit, aren’t I? And I saw her board a train to Ipswich. So she knows what it’s like there, and she’s still decided to leave him. She doesn’t understand that it would be better to bring him home.”
Joe walked around the room a couple of times, agitated now. “She’s probably right then, Alfie,” he said. “The hospital’s the best place for him. I know it’s rotten in there, but we have to believe that the doctors know what they’re doing. They’ll look after him. They’ll make him better.”
“But he barely recognized me!” shouted Alfie, standing up. “He’s not getting better. They won’t fix him there. I can fix him. If he’s back here where he belongs.”
“Alfie, why are you here?” asked Joe, throwing his hands up in the air. “Why did you come to me with this?”
“Because Old Bill Hemperton said that you were your own man and my dad’s your oldest friend, so I came here to ask you to help me.”
“To help you do what?”
“Break him out.”
Joe’s eyes opened wide. “Break him out?” he asked. “You want to break your father out of hospital?”
“And bring him home. I can’t do it alone. I thought you could help me.”
Joe shook his head. “I can’t do that, Alfie,” he said. “You think you’re helping him, but you might only make him worse.”
“No,” cried Alfie.
“You have to speak to your mum. Or your granny! Tell them what you know. Maybe you can all go there together. He might like a visit from the three people he loves the most in the—”
“No,” insisted Alfie. “You have to help me. There’s no one else I can trust.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” said Joe, shaking his head. “But I can’t.”
Alfie turned his
hands into fists and thumped the sofa in frustration. One of the pillows burst and all the stuffing flew out of it. He stared at the feathers as they floated in the air in front of him before grabbing one, a white one, and running across to press it against Joe’s chest.
Joe stared at it blankly as he held it in his hands. “Oh, Alfie,” he said with a deep sigh filled with pain—more pain than Alfie thought he had ever heard in a man’s voice before; and the moment he said his name, Alfie ran out into the corridor, threw open the front door, and charged outside, running down Damley Road as fast as he could, wanting to put everyone from the street as far behind him as he possibly could.
CHAPTER 11
PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES IN YOUR OLD KIT BAG
Alfie took an early train to the hospital, stepping into King’s Cross Station just after ten o’clock in the morning. It was a Monday, and normally he would have been in school on a Monday—which was history day—but he had different plans for this Monday, the day he was planning on saving his father’s life by breaking him out of the hospital.
Carrying a duffel bag over his shoulder, he bought himself a round-trip ticket from London to Ipswich and another single ticket from Ipswich to London. (Georgie wouldn’t be going back there, after all.) This time he found his platform without difficulty and settled into the corner of a carriage, talking to no one and trying to lose himself in Robinson Crusoe.
Arriving close to where he and Marian had alighted the previous week, he looked around, wondering whether anyone else might be getting off here, and when it seemed as if he were the only one, he began to worry that the train wouldn’t stop at all. But a few minutes later, to his relief, he felt the engines beginning to slow down and the train screeched to a halt as he hopped off, making his way down the narrow lane, toward the crossroads, and along the path that led to the East Suffolk and Ipswich Hospital.
Outside the main gate he waited for a few minutes, making sure that no one else was going to appear and want to know what he was doing there. He ran behind a tree to take care of some personal business and then, feeling that now was as good a time as any, sprinted up the driveway as fast as his legs could carry him. Through the front doors of the hospital, a dog appeared and growled at him, and Alfie stopped dead. He was a bit afraid of dogs; he had been ever since he’d been three and Jack Tamorin from number twenty’s terrier had snapped at his hand while he was trying to feed it a bone. He watched, waiting to see what happened, but the dog seemed to lose interest in him and finally trotted back indoors and out of sight.
Who would bring a dog into a hospital? wondered Alfie. It didn’t seem very hygienic.
A window opened behind him, and he pressed himself against a wall as a young woman’s head leaned out and looked down the drive. He was so close to her that he could have reached up and touched her, but she didn’t glance down under the windowsill, just out toward the gates.
“There’s no one there, Bessie,” she said, turning back. “You’re seeing things, you are. You’ve gone barmy. You need your Henry back, that’s what you need.”
“Chance’d be a fine thing,” replied an unseen person from inside. “He was somewhere outside Antwerp, last I heard. I’ll be lucky if I see him again this side of Christmas.”
“It’ll all be over by Christmas,” said the first girl, closing the window again, and whatever the response was to that, Alfie didn’t hear. But he hoped it was suitably unimpressed.
He slipped around the corner of the building and down the path toward the gap in the hedge where the patients had been sitting outside in the sunshine the previous week, hoping that the young man with the lank dark hair who had grabbed his arm wouldn’t be there, but this part of the garden was empty today; all the men must be indoors. The table that had held the newspapers and apples was still there, a blackbird perched on top of it, its head darting around as it scanned the tabletop for crumbs. Alfie stepped out into the clearing beyond and discovered two men sitting in wheelchairs. They both looked perfectly peaceful but were not speaking to each other. The second man had his back turned, like Georgie had the previous week, so Alfie couldn’t make out his face.
“Hello there,” said the man closest to him, putting his book down on his lap and taking his spectacles off. “And who might you be?”
Alfie looked at him and hesitated; he didn’t want to get into any conversations with the men today but thought it best not to antagonize anyone in case they called for a doctor or nurse.
“Alfie Summerfield,” he said.
“I had a brother called Alfie,” said the man, smiling at him. “His number got called at Ypres. Damned difficult word to say, Ypres, don’t you think? It took me a long time to get it right.”
“Yes, sir,” said Alfie, stepping past him to make his way down to the man at the end.
“Don’t go,” said the man, and something in his voice, something pleading, made Alfie stop and look at him. He wasn’t really that old. No more than twenty-five. He didn’t look as if he’d suffered any injuries and seemed to have recently had a wash as he smelled of soap and his hair was fluffy. “What are you doing here anyway? We don’t get many boys your age around here. None at all, in fact.”
“I’m looking for my dad,” said Alfie.
“Is he a doctor?”
Alfie was about to say no, that he was a patient, but thought better of it. “Yes,” he said. “I thought he might be out here.”
“We only see the doctors indoors,” said the man. “The nurses come and look after us here. Good thing too—they’re a far prettier lot. But tell me, where were you?”
Alfie stared at him, uncertain what the question meant. “Where was I?” he asked.
“Yes, where were you? France or Belgium?”
Alfie frowned. “Neither,” he said.
The man leaned forward and frowned. “You’re not a conchie, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh, all right then,” he said with a sigh, leaning back. “It hurts, doesn’t it?”
“What does?” asked Alfie.
“Don’t you hear it in your head? I do. Although it’s peaceful in the garden. I ask them to bring me out here, regardless of the weather. Can’t stand it inside. All that wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s positively biblical at times.”
As if on cue, there was a loud bang from the house, something like a door slamming as the wind rushed through a hallway. Alfie spun around in that direction, and when he looked back at the man, his eyes were closed and he seemed to be counting slowly in his head.
“Dr. Ridgewell tells me to do this,” he said after a moment, opening his eyes and attempting a smile. “I’m quite all right, really. I’m being sent home on Monday. What day is today?”
“Monday,” said Alfie.
“Oh,” replied the man, considering this. “Then they must have got it wrong. It’s a difficult word to say, isn’t it? Ypres. But then, that’s the French for you. They don’t like to make things easy. I knew a girl in Paris, you know. Fine little thing. Worked in a bistro off the avenue de la Motte-Picquet. Thought about marrying her, but I know what my father would have said if I’d brought her home. Can’t stand the Continentals, you see. And he has money, so he assumes everyone wants some of it. Never cared for money much, myself. Easy to say, I suppose, when you have a lot of it.”
Alfie looked toward the man at the end of the garden, and, as if he felt the boy’s eyes on him, he turned around. It wasn’t his dad.
“I have to go,” said Alfie.
“Off on your rounds, are you? You’re young for a doctor, but I suppose we must all chip in at these times.”
Alfie nodded and stepped away. He hated it here. He hated this place and he hated these people. Being at this hospital was like stepping into the middle of a nightmare where nothing anyone said made any sense. The men were all confused, living partly in the present, partly in the past, and partly in some no-man’s-land that they marched across, trying to dodge bullets and failing, flailing, falling. He
was doing the right thing getting his dad away from here, he was sure of it. He picked up the duffel bag and made his way through the hedge and over toward the hospital.
He stood outside now, dreading the idea of going back inside, but there was no way around it. He had hoped that he would discover Georgie out in the grounds and that they could make their escape together, but this hadn’t happened and he would have to go in search of him.
In one of those terrible wards.
He threw the duffel bag behind a potted plant and opened the door, poking his head inside. The coast was clear. There was a staircase halfway down the corridor and he looked up; it was at least three stories high, with rooms on the perimeter of every floor. His heart sank, wondering how on earth he would ever find his dad in so large a place.
In front of him was the nurses’ station where he had been discovered the last time, and he walked quickly toward it, pleased to see that there was no one there now. If the angry doctor found him again, he’d never believe his story about being the milkman’s son. He looked around, stepped behind the desk, and as he did so he saw Dr. Ridgewell, whose shoes he had shined twice now, emerging from one of the wards with another doctor, younger and nervous-looking, and he slipped down behind the counter, hoping that they wouldn’t come around to this side.
“… can go home early next week, I think,” Dr. Ridgewell was saying. “Book him in for some appointments with Davis in Harley Street. I’ve spoken to his secretary—she knows all about it. Once a week should be enough. It’s encouraging though, isn’t it? To see someone improve so much. It gives one hope for the others.”
“Have you heard anything from the War Office yet, Doctor?” said the younger man.
“About what?”
“Recognition.”
There was a silence for a few moments. “Not yet, no. None of these bloody politicians wants to be the one to actually state the obvious, to make it clear to the public that this condition is real and that it’s something we all have to deal with. We’ll be dealing with it for years to come, I’m afraid. The problem is, the public still think of it as cowardice, and no one in Parliament has the guts to tell them otherwise.”