The Wild Dark Flowers by Elizabeth Cooke Page B

shoulder. “I’m going to be a soldier,” he said.
    “God help us,” Mary muttered. She looked pityingly at the boy’s gangly, dirty shape, the string around his waist holding up his trousers, and a thick misshapen knitted coat on his back. A cap was positioned far back on his too-large head. He turned, and grinned at her and began to sing “
There’s a silver lining through the dark clouds shining . . 
.”
    “They don’t want daft folks. Get along with you,” she shouted.
    He took no notice of her, just kept stamping up and down with his makeshift rifle. Eventually, he went to the archway through to the kitchen garden and there he half kneeled down, pretending to shoot at an enemy among the bean sticks and mounded potato rows.
    “Ay-up,” he yelled. “I got yer, dirty German, dirty German! I got you proper dead, I did!”
    And all the while, watching him, Mary was thinking,
not Alfie, please. Not Alfie.

D onald Harrison was as far away from Rutherford as he could possibly be, and he was very glad of it.
    Not in miles. No, not that. Not as far from home as some who wore the uniform of the Allies. But as they sat in the open coal carts of the makeshift troop transport—these slow-rumbling tracks had once served the coal mines that were close by in the French countryside—he had heard Canadian voices, and he had seen colonial troops. He hadn’t come as far as they had, across vast oceans, to fight here. But he had traveled through solar systems in his head, and he was still flying, still hurtling away from his past.
    The Canadians had told him where they’d been born—places with odd-sounding names like Saskatchewan—and he’d been asked his. “Yorkshire?” one had queried. “What are you doing in a London regiment, then?”
    “Running away,” he’d told them. They had laughed. But it was true.
    He’d run away from one world, and fetched up in this one, and he was grateful for it. All around him, men talked about working in docks, on roads, on farms; sweating through their days, going hungry. Sometimes he heard a man say that he had been in a store, or had been a salesman, or in a bank; but for the most part they were just poor. Desperately poor. He never told them what he had done, back there in the faraway other world. “Footman,” would be like admitting to being a jumped-up lackey, a groveler, a fairy boy. No, he had kept his mouth shut. No one pressed him on it. No one cared.
    On the ship across the Channel, Harrison had been standing behind a rail when he overheard an officer saying that all the London volunteers were “rats that ran out of the slums for something to eat.” But Harrison didn’t bear a grudge. The man had been right, standing up there with his swagger stick tucked under his arm. Right about them all as they had trudged past at Le Havre, straight off the boat: they were all wily hard-faced men relishing the fine adventure of war, and—rats or no rats—he was proud to be one of them.
    Next to him in line had been a Cockney who claimed he was eighteen, although he looked much younger. He swore and shrugged and coughed and giggled; he couldn’t finish a sentence without obscenities. Harrison had watched him admiringly. Rats swam in sewers and came up stronger than ever. They bit and fought and fled. This boy alongside him would live if he could, and spit in the Kaiser’s eye. He was someone to keep near, to copy, to follow, young as he was, a boy who had been dragged up in a tenement near the East India Docks. He’d asked the boy what he would do if faced with a German. “Piss in his sauerkraut,” had been the cheerful answer. “Wear ’is bollocks on a fine Sunday ’at.” He’d stuck out his hand. “Ned Billings.”
    They had been left there in the French port for twelve hours, and they had all put their packs down on the cobbled street, and after a while they had slept, slumped in disorganized piles. Harrison had stretched out among them all and felt relaxed