The Wild Dark Flowers by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

raised her eyes. “Do you think he will? Kill someone, I mean?”
    “It’s a war, isn’t it?” Mary replied. “What do you think they do to Germans? Dance with them?”
    Jenny sat down abruptly on the low wall just inside the kitchen garden. “Really kill someone,” she murmured. “Not to play at it. To kill someone just like them. It don’t seem right.”
    “That’s what it is, though. That’s what I’m saying to you.”
    “My brother’s gone. My younger one, Georgie. He’s sixteen.”
    “Sixteen? That’s not allowed.”
    Jenny played with the tie of her apron, frowning. “He lied to the recruitment officer, and he lied to Ma that they wouldn’t take him—said that he was just going along to the hall as a joke. But he went ahead and signed the paper. My ma went along and complained, but they showed her the form. She’s got no birth certificate. She can’t proper remember like, what year he was born. But he says eighteen, and he’s big, you know? Six foot two. So they took him. Ma says they must be getting desperate.”
    “He must be keen.”
    “Yes, but I don’t know how he’ll get on. Georgie couldn’t tie his own shoelaces till he was eight, he’s that clumsy.” Jenny gave out a great ragged sigh. “Just a big bloomin’ ox, he is, and twice as stupid. He says it’ll take more than a bullet to stop him, but a bullet would stop anyone, wouldn’t it? He doesn’t believe it. He thinks he’ll just get up and go on.” Her voice dropped.
    Out beyond her, Mary could see the sun shining on the neat rows of bean sticks, yards and yards of them in military formation. She thought of men lined up in rows like that, but with no sun shining on them, and no heavy peace weighing on them until the lines seemed asleep in the long, drowsy afternoon.
    “It’s like he don’t understand,” Jenny was saying. “And there’s more than bullets, ain’t there? My friend’s brother went out on a raid at night, and he never come back. They don’t know where he is. He just never come back. They say he’s missing. Not alive and not dead, just ‘missing.’”
    She got up now and stood beside Mary, looking out at the kitchen garden. “His father got up out of his bed—he’s been ailing a year—and he got dressed and he went down to Stepney and asked what it meant,” she said softly. “He went out every day and he collapsed in the street and they took him to the hospital and he’s there yet. And he keeps saying, “My boy’s missing.” Just keeps saying it. I mean, how could they lose anyone? Why don’t they know?” Her voice wavered.
    Mary caught hold of Jenny’s hand. “Your brother will be all right.”
    “Oh, Mary,” Jenny whispered. “Ain’t it all so awful, though?”
    “We just won’t think about it,” Mary told her resolutely. “We won’t talk about it and we won’t think about it, neither Nash nor Harrison nor Georgie nor any of them.”
    “No,” Jenny echoed unconvincingly.
    “And we’ll just get on with it.”
    “Yes, we’ll get on with it.” And the two girls looked at each other, each with a brightly despairing smile.
    Suddenly, from the house, they heard a reedy voice singing. The door to the laundry and kitchen corridor swung open, and Alfred, the hallboy, came striding out into the sunshine, covered from head to foot in coal dust. He was grinning, carrying a slab of bread and butter in his grimy fist.
    Mary looked at him severely. “Where’d you get that?”
    “Ay-up,” he greeted her casually. “Cook give it me.”
    “And look at the state of you!”
    He shrugged. “I don’t care.”
    “I know
you
don’t care, you barmpot,” Mary retorted. “But you get one dot of soot on those sheets and I’ll string you up.”
    Alfred shoved the last of the bread into his mouth. He shuffled off across the yard, swinging his arms haphazardly. He made a clumsy attempt to march up and down among the waste bins, where he picked up a stick and balanced it on one