A Sort of Life by Graham Greene Page B

should I go back to my prison. There were enough blackberries that fine autumn to keep me from hunger, and I prided myself on knowing every hidden trench. This time it was a quisling who took to the maquis . What I cannot remember arranging was any way by which my parents could communicate the news of their surrender.
    There was a wonderful sense of release from all the tension and the indecision as I made my way up the long road lined with Spanish chestnuts from the ruined castle to the slope where the Common began. I had to hurry, for here on this open road I might have been intercepted, but the race against time was part of the excitement on that golden autumn day, with a faint mist lying along the canal, across the watercress beds by the railway viaduct and in the grassy pool of the castle. Then I was safely there, on the Common, among the gorse and bracken of my chosen battlefield.
    I had brought a book in my pocket, but I was much too excited to read, for I had a whole campaign to plan. There were two routes a search-party might take, the one by the road I had come and another through Kitchener’s Fields which entered the Common by a flank. There was one point of vantage, an abandoned firing-butt, from which I could see anyone who approached for a hundred yards around, but there I would be exposed myself and I didn’t like the idea of my rebellion ending in an undignified chase. I wanted to be an invisible watcher, a spy on all that went on, and so I moved restlessly among the bushes on the edge of the Common, watching for the enemy, ready to retreat unseen into the depths, like the franc-tireurs of Henty or David Balfour pursued by red-coats or Buchan’s Hannay.
    It was still too early for the invasion to begin. Immediately after breakfast my mother would be busy with the kitchen, the nursery, the linen-cupboard; my father would be shut in his study workingon the Scheme – an elaborate game of his own invention consisting of a large board with slots of vari-coloured cards. With its help he was able to ensure that on the school timetable a master was not allotted contradictory duties, to teach Latin Composition to IV b simultaneously with English literature to va. Visiting headmasters were introduced to this Scheme with pride, and I think my father took as much pleasure in shifting a pink card to an empty space or solving a difficult problem with a ‘free period’ in white as in moving a queen to mate at chess or suddenly disrupting an opponent’s attack by castling. He would sit over the board for half an hour at a time, motionless, in the attitude of Rodin’s Thinker. No one would surely be bold enough to disturb him, while he was bent over his essential game, with my peace-destroying note.
    I think at least two hours must have passed, and I would like to know now what conferences were held, what tactics were suggested, what decisions were made. But it is too late for me to find out. All the protagonists are dead except myself – my father, my mother, my elder sister, even the head housemaid who would have known all. I can imagine the bruit extending, in spite of all precautions, upstairs to the nursery and along the passage to the kitchen quarters: what a murmur of under-housemaids and scullery-maids, and the gardener perhaps leaning in at the kitchen-window to catch the latest report. And all this time I had nothing to do but roam my battlefield from bush to bush. My resolution was quite unchanged. I had asserted my freedom. Let others clean up the mess, I was happy, and never in the future – not even when I played Russian roulette on this same Common – did I experience again the hopeless misery of the years which I was escaping now.
    It was time I looked at my exposed flank – a steep clay path between oaks and beeches above Kitchener’s Fields. I moved rashly out beyond the cover of the bushes and began to descend, until, turning a corner, I came face to face with my elder sister, Molly. I could have