The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  Emil was so engrossed that he did not notice, at first, the women who had entered the glade and looked disapprovingly down on the battle. There were five of them, four matrons and one woman much younger, dressed in grey finery with huge white collars. The younger woman had a most severe look, elegant and cold, with hair that was turning from blond to a brilliant white and eyes almost as pale. It was she who set foot in the battlefield, to the consternation of the boys whose soldiers were about to meet. The cries of foul play went up around them, boys scrambled to right their soldiers – and Emil, who was already referring to the Rules of Engagement inside each Long War box, did not notice that it was to him that the woman was purposefully striding.

  ‘Sir?’ she began.

  ‘One moment, madam, this is an emergency …’

  ‘There is one more emergency at hand, good sir.’

  Emil looked up from his notes and was perplexed to see the woman standing imperiously above, like she was the goddess and he the lowly soldier sent out to do battle. Pinched between her fingers stood a single white feather. It trembled in the warm Emporium air.

  All of his world zoned in on that single feather. The rest of the Emporium faded. When it returned, Emil saw that some of the boys had stopped making battle to stare at him. He came to his senses with a resounding crash.

  ‘We are representatives,’ the woman began, as if reading from a hymn sheet, ‘of the Order of the White Feather. We are the champions of fairness and courage. We who are forbidden from defending our King and Country must do our part nonetheless. And it is with this ambition that I present this feather to you, as a mark of your cowardice, your lack of brotherhood, your childishness, that you are not with our fathers and brothers, defending the realm.’

  The feather was in Emil’s fingers before he could reply, the woman turning on her heel to join her elders, who had been looking admiringly on.

  That feather, that white feather – and it hadn’t even belonged to a swan! It had been torn from the wing of some scrubbed-out seagull, its quill still marked with the poor bird’s blood.

  He felt the eyes of every boy playing his Long War on him. That they should think him a coward was the most injurious of all. Letting the feather slip through his fingers (it floated dreamily over the battlefield; the toy soldiers must have thought it some angel from above), he took off at a run.

  The women were already marching back along the aisle. They had handed a white feather to one of the Emporium customers as well, a boy barely out of short trousers who had (to his playmate’s horror) been gazing up at the dancing ballerina bears when the Order descended.

  They were leafletting too. Handing leaflets out in his Emporium! Emil tore one from the hand of a stunned mother as he cartwheeled past.

  *

  TO THE YOUNG WOMEN OF LONDON!

  Is your best boy wearing khaki? If not, don’t YOU THINK

  he should be?

  If he does not think that you and your country are worth

  fighting for – do you think he is WORTHY of you?

  If your young man neglects his duty to King and Country,

  the time may come when he will NEGLECT YOU

  JOIN THE ARMY TO-DAY!

  *

  Emil tore it into a thousand shreds, cast it all around him to join the confetti snow. Then he ploughed after the woman, up into the half-moon hall.

  ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you. This is my Emporium, mine, and you’re here at my consent or not at all. But, since you’ve flaunted your way in here to make your accusations, I’ll have you know this: I was the first to sign up. I was at the recruiting office when summer was still high. I’d be in France now, doing my part for my King and my Country, if they would have had me. Coward? Walk into my Emporium and call me a coward? I’m no coward, madam. My name is Emil Godman and, what’s more, I am no one’s young man. I am nobody’s, do you hear? I’m not in danger of neglecting a soul, because I don’t have a soul I could neglect! Do you understand!?’

  The woman had stopped in the doorway, while her elders streamed out into Iron Duke Mews. She turned. Now that she was alone, without those harridans on her shoulder, she did not look as imperious, nor as severe. Her pale eyes were even beautiful, Emil thought, and that was such a terrible thing to have noticed.

  ‘Nobody?’ she asked, and Emil stood there dumbly, wondering what on earth she could have meant.

  By special dispensation, and in accordance with the benefits of its Royal Warrant, Papa Jack’s Emporium opened long into the night. The sounds of games being played, the roar of a winter dragon, all of this carried out into Iron Duke Mews and the quiet cityscape beyond. Joy was infectious and London deserved its joy, in this of all winters.

  When the shopfloor was finally silent – and Sally-Anne leading the shop girls in their nightly parade of the aisles, rooting out any adventurers hoping to hide out overnight – Cathy slipped through the refracting snowflaks and up the servants’ stair. As was his habit, Papa Jack had not been there to watch over opening night (though perhaps he watched through his phoenix’s eyes, entangled with the spyglass hanging over his workshop hearth). The toymaker remained in his workshop, spiriting new creations into being – and that was where Cathy found him, with his hands deep in the innards of some patchwork beast.

  ‘A spider,’ he said as Cathy stepped through. ‘A giant, to hide in the cellars and scare boys adventurous enough to venture down. Perhaps, a legend to last the winters to come …’

  Cathy strode across the workshop and, before Papa Jack lifted himself from the beast, she cast the bundle of Kaspar’s letters on to the trunk at his side. There they splayed open, Kaspar’s florid hand across each: Mrs K. Godman, Papa Jack’s Emporium, Iron Duke Mews.

  ‘He’s lying to me. He’s been lying all along. Robert Kesey is dead. Who knows how many more?’ She did not tremble, for she had done her trembling now. ‘None of them made it home by first frost, so it isn’t as if they’re the only ones who lied. The whole world is living a lie, one that nobody cares to acknowledge. It will be fast, they told us. It’s barely even a war. Who would dare stand up to our brave British boys …’ She paused. ‘I’m afraid for him, Jekabs – but, if all these letters are lies, if he daren’t tell the truth, well, then he doesn’t care for me at all.’

  Papa Jack stood, the gears in the spider’s chest winding down. ‘Hush now, Cathy, he’s your Kaspar. Don’t call them lies. Instead, call them … fancies. Hasn’t Martha slept more easily at night, knowing her papa’s safe and sound? Haven’t you?’

  Cathy was about to reply when something stalled her. ‘You … knew?’

  Sighing, he sank into his chair. The arms rose up to give him comfort.

  ‘My boy has been writing to me as well.’

  Secrets, thought Cathy with a curse. Her life in the Emporium had been secrets before – but only secrets shared, never secrets between them.

  ‘You must understand the position he’s in. Do you think they would let him write with such news? No, you’d receive letters scoured out, big lines of black. It is an act of love, Cathy, truly it is. What good would knowing—’

  ‘He told you, didn’t he?’

  ‘I am his father.

  ‘I am his wife. He’d have me thinking he’s out there, basking in a rose garden, tasting borage and mint, until the day his letters don’t come and, instead, there’s a telegram at the door, some secretary writing for some general, and that’s it, the end of Kaspar’s life, the end of my family. Just like it happened for Robert Kesey.’

  She marched back to the door.

  ‘Cathy, don’t you—’ Papa Jack opened his hands, taking in the letters she had left behind.

  ‘Keep them,’ she said. ‘What use are they to me?’

  She was already in the hallway, among hanging jack-in-a-boxes and dismembered clowns, when Papa Jack begged her to stay. Cathy had never liked the sound of Jekabs Godman uncertain of himself, and it was this that compelled her to turn around. Back in th
e workshop, he was lifting something from the trunk where he kept his winter toy. He grasped a little leather journal in his hands, the stub of a pencil dangling from it on a ribbon.

  ‘I made them for my sons, the year the Emporium opened. Oh, they were secretive little boys, and me barely a father, so long had I been missing from their lives. All they truly had was each other. They had their own language, a feral little tongue I could no more understand than the English around me. This journal, this one you’re holding, this was Emil’s. The other Kaspar took with him. I entangled the two together, you see. Go now, open it up. See for yourself …’

  On the first page were the words, DOES IT WORK? and, below that, in Kaspar’s very particular scrawl, IT REALLY DOES! PAPA IS A GENIUS! The pages after had been torn out, perhaps in some childhood pique. The next were all filled with Kaspar’s hand – and yet the date he had scratched out at the top read 31 August 1914, the very night he had left.

  ‘How can that be?’

  Papa Jack rolled his fingers, urging her to turn the pages.

  Here was more of Kaspar’s writing, more and yet more: 2nd September. 19th. 1st October. 2nd, 3rd, 4th. Pages and pages were filled with his missives. She saw Robert Kesey’s name leap out. Robert Kesey is dead.

  ‘He writes to you in it,’ said Cathy, ‘he sends you letters through his journal …’

  ‘One more of the old toys you know about, now. One more secret. I built these so that my sons could whisper secrets to each other from one end of the Emporium to the other, or tell stories in the dead of night. Mostly they used it to taunt each other in that Long War of theirs – but boys, as the English say, will be boys. They forgot about them, in the end. Well, there were so many other new toys in those days. Every season some new fascination for them to explore …’

  Papa Jack returned to the floor, where he delved again into the belly of the giant beast.

  ‘Jekabs …’

  ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t hidden a thing from me. I can assure you of that. It’s all in there, if you want to see it, all of Kaspar Godman’s war.’

  THE TOYMAKER’S WAR

  PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, NOVEMBER 1914–AUGUST 1917

  Sirius was waiting for her when she returned to her bedroom. Perhaps he recognised the journal from Kaspar’s boyhood days, for he nosed at it with his cross-stitched snout. ‘Off with you now,’ said Cathy, first making certain his motors were wound. If she was going to do this, she was going to do it alone.

  The Emporium at night could be an eerie place, in winter most of all. You could hear the skittering of toys left wound up, and the shop hands – those not making merry hell in the Palace – still roamed the aisles, readying for the morning rush. But Cathy locked the door, remained in her own private world – and, when she found the courage, opened the journal. Kaspar’s handwriting was so like him, elegant and wild, full of bold flourishes and curls.

  My papa, I had not known you kept our old journals, but when you pressed this into my hands the morning I left our beloved Emporium, I felt a rush of such nostalgia I cannot set it down in words. But perhaps you know it. I treasured this collection of paper and thread once, and I will treasure it now, as I head into the unknown. My papa at my side! Promise me that you will keep what news you can from Cathy and Martha. To them I send missives of love. To you, who have seen so much more than me, the truth unvarnished.

  We have completed our training and embark for Belgium before dawn. Tonight Douglas Flood and I play cards against Robert Kesey and Andrew Dunmore, but I have been forbidden from dealing the pack (they consider me a conjuror). It has been strange to be away from our Emporium for more than a night, and for myself I find it stranger still to remember there was a time when the Emporium was not home. For the boys I travel with, tomorrow will be their first taste of foreign air. They ask me about the world as if I know anything of it, when the truth is that, to me, those years before the Emporium are a dream.

  Stranger still is being without Emil. We dedicate meals to him (the food is not near Mrs Hornung’s delectable standard, but Emil would like it all the same), and think of him often. No doubt you find it some comfort that he remains to look over the shopfloor and cultivate marvels this summer, and I admit I find it some comfort that he will be there for Cathy and Martha as well, but I remember the look in Emil’s eyes when the physicians declared him exempt. Of course, they say we shall be home by Christmas, and – adventuring aside – it is that which I hope for. I should like to see Martha marvelling at opening night, and wake with Cathy to give her our gifts come Christmas morning.

  There was more. Kaspar described his training in details meant to delight his father, lampooning the other recruits and singing the praises of every Emporium shop hand – who, or so Kaspar professed, showed dexterity beyond the requirements of mortal man, and thus had proven themselves particularly adept at fixing a bayonet, patching a sand-bag, and shoeing a malcontent horse.

  Shoeing a stallion is quite different from appending a runner to a rocking horse, but in the end it is not nearly as difficult. Do you remember the Arabians we built for the Christmas of ’99? I recall them as more dastardly than any warhorse I am likely to meet. And this reminds me, Papa: Douglas Flood has been assigned as an ostler’s assistant. It means he must shovel manure all day. Not a duty with which he ever had to contend in the Emporium corrals …

  The next time Kaspar wrote he was in Belgium, where the 7th Division had arrived too late to prevent the fall of Antwerp and had turned, instead, toward the Flemish town of Ypres, already overrun. Cathy knew the town only from the stamps on the bails of linen delivered to the Emporium doors, but the image she had of it proved to be remarkably similar to Kaspar’s own: a tumbledown town of stone walls and turrets, more weathered and steeped in history than any model village or foldaway fortress the Emporium had ever made. It was here, Kaspar declared, that the Division would halt the enemy’s advance. And,

  Tell me about Cathy. She has written to me that all is well, that Martha remains proud of her Papa and makes pictures of me each night. But – what is the truth, Papa? Are they well?

  Cathy almost shut the journal then. The temptation to cast it across the room was almost insurmountable. ‘You’d have known, if only you’d asked,’ she whispered, and her vitriol showed itself in spittle showered across the page. Wherever Kaspar was now, perhaps the ink in his own journal was smearing just as the ink in this.

  On the next page Papa Jack had written, for the first time, back to his son.

  My Kaspar, how good it feels to see your words. The Emporium continues as you can imagine, with long days and nights, empty of everything but the invention. I will keep my promise, my boy, and say nothing of our communications to Cathy and Martha – yet perhaps you do them little credit, for they are thinking of you and know you too well to believe in the fairy tales you send.

  Your patchwork dog whimpers at your bedside at night, but Martha and Cathy are keeping it warm.

  Sometimes the missives came in a flurry. Other times, there were weeks between each and Papa Jack filled the silences with quiet reports of interludes at the Emporium. As Papa Jack wrote of the patchwork spider he was planning, Kaspar found himself marching the flat lowlands of the Belgian border, those farms and coppices of ancient Flanders. ‘It is a challenge to reach the sea,’ he declared, with the glee of one boy defying another to beat him in a race, ‘and by this many battles will be saved.’

  Cathy’s breathing stilled as she read the next pages. For Kaspar had not reached Ypres, not without seeing his very first battle. Those same farms and coverts that he described so gaily, that was where he had first fired a gun. And, ‘It was not nearly as I had thought, Papa,’ was all that he wrote. ‘Yet now we have reached Ypres. Through the darkness we can hear them in the fields, but the town is ours … and it is here I shall spend my opening night.’

  The next letter described the Division at rest as winter approached. Ypres was a welcome distraction from the camps and b
arns they had barracked in on the march. There were beds and soft linen and (Cathy winced) French girls in the beer halls at night. There was food, as well, better food than the tins and dried army rations on which they had marched. Not Mrs Hornung’s Emporium fare, that much was true, but delectable all the same.

  Papa! (read the following page) First frost across Ypres. What magics on opening night?

  And, beneath that, in Papa Jack’s own hand:

  Alas, no frost across the Emporium roofs! You are not so very far away, my son, but winter keeps its own pace. Be safe and be warm.

  She had startled at the thought of Kaspar seeing battle, but it was the idea that, for the very first time, Kaspar had known a different first frost to the Emporium that made Cathy soften toward him. She looked at the date Kaspar had scrawled at the top of this missive. Two weeks had passed since that date – and she pictured him, standing on the ramparts (did they have ramparts in Ypres?) and gazing out over Flanders fields, bejewelled in white. How homesick he must have felt, even with the shop hands around him.

  All the same, the next pages revealed Kaspar content with his lot. He professed his fears for Cathy and Martha often – but, of Ypres and the villages behind the front where the Division made its barracks, he spoke in glowing terms.

  I am making us toy soldiers, Papa. Little trinkets to sit in our barracks or carry with us on patrols. Nightly we must walk them and a man can feel awfully alone, marching in file through farms and forest he does not know. A toy soldier in a pocket can be great comfort. It tells us we are part of a tribe. I wonder, Papa, about the years you spent in the frozen East, and what your toy soldiers meant to you …