A long time later, as a young journalist, I was talking to a man from the local British Legion, who said, ‘We are building a new headquarters and you might be surprised that it will be opened by none other than a local man called Tommy Atkins, who actually fought in that war.’ Later, when I got back to the office and told everybody, many of the younger journalists didn’t know who Tommy Atkins was; which rather upset me.
In my grandfather’s day, the troops were referred to as ‘Tommies’, a nickname that they had come by in a typically British way. Every young man entering the army had to write his name in his pay book. The powers that were in those days, realizing that some of the young men might have difficulty with reading and writing, had printed the name Tommy Atkins to show where they should make their mark. And so, in a very British way, thereafter an enlisted man became known as a ‘Tommy’.
In the Second World War my grandfather was, of course, too old to fight on any front other than the Home Front, and joined the Home Guard. Long before Dad’s Army was on the television he told me a lot about being a gardener by day and waiting for the German invasion by night. It was real Dad’s Army stuff. Having fought in the Great War, he had a higher rank in the Home Guard than his boss, who was a bigwig in monetary affairs in London, and very snooty, not wanting to take orders from a gardener. On one occasion in a Home Guard parade my granddad’s boss got a bit bolshie and decided he wouldn’t take an order from his gardener, and got bawled out for it by a full-time ranking officer, who shouted to him, ‘Private Kay, you will obey the orders of Corporal Pratchett!’
My grandfather spent a long time in his potting shed after that. But no harm was done, and his boss actually came and apologized. It was definitely a Dad’s Army moment.
And since it seemed to me that the Tommies were not very well known, much later I wrote a book called Johnny and the Dead, where our hero, Johnny Maxwell, meets young Tommy Atkins and learns about that terrible war.
Even now I can remember my granddad, a fairly burly, heavy man, wet with tears . . . Well, it wasn’t normal granddad behaviour! But, of course, as I grew older, I knew that those who didn’t get killed nevertheless cried.
FROM JOHNNY AND THE DEAD
‘Here, look at this,’ said Yo-less.
They clustered around his viewer. He’d found an ancient group photograph of about thirty soldiers, all beaming at the camera.
‘Well?’ said Wobbler.
‘This is from nineteen sixteen,’ said Yo-less. ‘They’re all going off to war.’
‘Which one?’ said Wobbler.
‘The first one, you nerd. World War One.’
‘I always wondered why they numbered it,’ said Bigmac. ‘Like they expected to have a few more. You know. Like Buy Two, Get One Free.’
‘Says here,’ Yo-less squinted, ‘it’s the Blackbury Old Pals Battalion. They’re just going off to fight. They all joined up at the same time . . .’
Johnny stared. He could hear people’s voices, and the background noises of the library. But the picture looked as if it was at the bottom of a dark, square tunnel. And he was falling down it.
Things outside the picture were inky and slow. The picture was the centre of the world.
Johnny looked at the grinning faces, the terrible haircuts, the jug-handle ears, the thumbs all up.
Even today nearly everyone in the Blackbury Guardian had their photo taken with their thumb up, unless they’d won Super Bingo, in which case they were shown doing what the photographer thought was a high kick. The newspaper’s one photographer was known as Jeremy the Thumb.
The people in the picture didn’t look much older than Bigmac. Well, a couple of them did. There was a sergeant with a moustache like a scrubbing brush, and an officer in jodhpurs, but the rest of them looked like a school photo.
And now he was coming back from wherever he’d been. The picture dropped away again, became just an oblong on a page on a screen. He blinked.
There was a feeling, like—
Like on an aeroplane when it’s about to land, and his ears went ‘pop’. But it was happening with his brain, instead.
‘Anyone know what the Somme is?’ said Yo-less.
‘No.’
‘That’s where they went, anyway. Some place in France.’
‘Any of them win any medals?’ said Johnny, struggling back into the real world. ‘That’d be famous. If there’s someone in the cemetery with a lot of medals.’
Yo-less spun the wheels of the viewer.
‘I’ll look ahead a few issues,’ he said. ‘There’s bound to be something if— Hey . . . look at this . . .’
They all tried to get under the hood at once. Silence came back as they realized what he’d found.
I knew it was important, Johnny thought. What’s happening to me?
‘Wow,’ said Wobbler. ‘I mean – all those names . . . everyone killed in this big battle . . .’
Without saying anything, Johnny ducked into the other reader and wound it backward until he found the cheery photograph.
‘Are they listed in alphabetical order?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Yo-less.
‘I’ll read out the names under the photo, then. Um . . . Armitage, K . . . Atkins, T . . .’
‘Yes . . . no . . .’ said Yo-less. ‘Sergeant Atterbury, F . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘Hey, there’s three from Canal Street,’ said Wobbler. ‘That’s where my gran lives!’
‘Blazer . . . Constantine . . . Fraser . . . Frobisher . . .’
‘Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .’
They carried on to the end of the caption. ‘They all died,’ said Johnny, eventually.
‘Four weeks after the picture was taken. All of them.’
‘Except for Atkins, T.,’ said Yo-less. ‘It says here what a Pals’ Battalion was. It says, people all from one town or even one street could all join the Army together if they wanted, and all get sent to . . . the same place.’
‘I wonder if they all got there?’ said Yo-less. ‘Eventually,’ he added.
‘That’s dreadful,’ said Bigmac.
‘It probably sounded like a good idea at the time. Sort of . . . jolly.’
‘Yes, but . . . four weeks . . .’ said Bigmac. ‘I mean . . .’
‘You’re always saying you can’t wait to join the Army,’ said Wobbler. ‘You said you were sorry the Gulf War was over. And all the legs of your bed are off the ground because of all them copies of Guns and Ammo underneath it.’
‘Well . . . yeah . . . war, yeah,’ said Bigmac. ‘Proper fighting, with M16s and stuff. Not just all going off grinning and getting shot.’
‘They all marched off together because they were friends, and got killed,’ said Yo-less.
They stared at the little square of light with the names on it, and the long, long line of cheery thumbs.
‘Except for Atkins, T.,’ said Johnny. ‘I wonder what happened to him?’
‘It was nineteen sixteen,’ said Yo-less. ‘If he’s still alive, he’ll be dead.’
‘Any of them on your list?’ said Wobbler.
Johnny checked.
‘No-oo,’ he said, eventually. ‘There’s one or two people with the same name but the wrong initial. Everyone round here used to get buried up there.’
‘Perhaps he came back from the war and moved away somewhere else,’ said Yo-less.
‘It’d be a bit lonely around here, after all,’ said Bigmac.
They looked at him.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘I’m fed up with this,’ said Wobbler, pushing his chair back. ‘It’s not real. There’s no one special in there. It’s just people. And it’s creepy. Come on, let’s go down to the mall.’
‘I’ve found out what happens to dead bodies when old graveyards are built on,’ said Yo-less, as they stepped out into the Tupperware daylight. ‘My mum knows. They get taken to some kind of storage place called a necropolis. That’s Latin for City of the Dead.’
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‘Yuk,’ said Wobbler.
‘Sounds like where Superman lives,’ said Bigmac.
‘Necropolis!’ said Wobbler, zooming his hands through the air. ‘By day, mild-mannered corpse – by night . . . duh duh duhduh DAH . . . ZombieMan!’
Johnny remembered the grinning young faces, not much older than Wobbler.
‘Wobbler,’ he said, ‘if you make another joke like that—’
‘What?’
‘. . . well . . . just don’t. Right? I mean it.’
Terry Pratchett
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS – Bishop, poet and theologian
Like lots of Rudyard Kipling’s stories, this one takes a while to understand, but is very vivid and shocking. It’s about a nice, comfortable German lady who’s in bed with flu and suddenly finds her bedroom visited by the ghosts of five children who’ve been killed in France or Belgium when their village was attacked, perhaps bombed, by the German army. The lady can’t believe that things like this happen in war and tries to pretend that it must all have been an accident . . .
The title and the passage at the end refer to something Jesus says in the Bible about how we try to clean up our souls and pretend everything is all right when it isn’t – so that what we’re doing is making more room for the devil (the spirit of untruth) to come in.
Kipling wrote this out of his own furious grief and anger at losing his son in the war, and it shows how much he hated the Germans. But the point he makes is not just about Germans – it is about how we so often avoid thinking about what the real cost of war is for innocent people, especially children.
Since the First World War, the methods of war have meant more and more deaths for people not actually involved in fighting. Kipling makes us see that if we pretend this doesn’t happen, we’re living in an unreal world. Even if you believe (as Kipling did) that war sometimes can’t be avoided, it’s important to face what it’s going to mean for those least able to protect themselves. In other words, Kipling is reminding us that the story of war is not only a story about soldiers.
SWEPT AND GARNISHED
They were there – five of them, two little boys and three girls – headed by the anxious-eyed ten-year-old whom she had seen before. They must have entered by the outer door, which Anna had neglected to shut behind her when she returned with the inhaler. She counted them backward and forward as one counts scales – one, two, three, four, five.
They took no notice of her, but hung about, first on one foot then on the other, like strayed chickens, the smaller ones holding by the larger. They had the air of utterly wearied passengers in a railway waiting-room, and their clothes were disgracefully dirty.
‘Go away!’ cried Frau Ebermann at last, after she had struggled, it seemed to her, for years to shape the words.
‘You called?’ said Anna at the living-room door.
‘No,’ said her mistress. ‘Did you shut the flat door when you came in?’
‘Assuredly,’ said Anna. ‘Besides, it is made to catch shut of itself.’
‘Then go away,’ said she, very little above a whisper. If Anna pretended not to see the children, she would speak to Anna later on.
‘And now,’ she said, turning toward them as soon as the door closed. The smallest of the crowd smiled at her, and shook his head before he buried it in his sister’s skirts.
‘Why – don’t – you – go – away?’ she whispered earnestly.
Again they took no notice, but, guided by the elder girl, set themselves to climb, boots and all, on to the green plush sofa in front of the radiator. The little boys had to be pushed, as they could not compass the stretch unaided. They settled themselves in a row, with small gasps of relief, and pawed the plush approvingly.
‘I ask you – I ask you why do you not go away – why do you not go away?’ Frau Ebermann found herself repeating the question twenty times. It seemed to her that everything in the world hung on the answer. ‘You know you should not come into houses and rooms unless you are invited. Not houses and bedrooms, you know.’
‘No,’ a solemn little six-year-old repeated, ‘not houses nor bedrooms, nor dining-rooms, nor churches, nor all those places. Shouldn’t come in. It’s rude.’
“Yes, he said so,’ the younger girl put in proudly. ‘He said it. He told them only pigs would do that.’ The line nodded and dimpled one to another with little explosive giggles, such as children use when they tell deeds of great daring against their elders.
‘If you know it is wrong, that makes it much worse,’ said Frau Ebermann.
‘Oh yes; much worse,’ they assented cheerfully, till the smallest boy changed his smile to a baby wail of weariness.
‘When will they come for us?’ he asked, and the girl at the head of the row hauled him bodily into her square little capable lap.
‘He’s tired,’ she explained. ‘He is only four. He only had his first breeches this spring.’ They came almost under his armpits, and were held up by broad linen braces, which, his sorrow diverted for the moment, he patted proudly.
‘Yes, beautiful, dear,’ said both girls.
‘Go away!’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘Go home to your father and mother!’
Their faces grew grave at once.
‘H’sh! We can’t,’ whispered the eldest. ‘There isn’t anything left.’
‘All gone,’ a boy echoed, and he puffed through pursed lips. ‘Like that, uncle told me. Both cows too.’
‘And my own three ducks,’ the boy on the girl’s lap said sleepily.
‘So, you see, we came here.’ The elder girl leaned forward a little, caressing the child she rocked.
‘I – I don’t understand,’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘Are you lost, then? You must tell our police.’
‘Oh no; we are only waiting.’
‘But what are you waiting for?’
‘We are waiting for our people to come for us. They told us to come here and wait for them. So we are waiting till they come,’ the eldest girl replied.
‘Yes. We are waiting till our people come for us,’ said all the others in chorus.
‘But,’ said Frau Ebermann very patiently – ‘but now tell me, for I tell you that I am not in the least angry, where do you come from? Where do you come from?’
The five gave the names of two villages of which she had read in the papers.
‘That is silly,’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘The people fired on us, and they were punished. Those places are wiped out, stamped flat.’
‘Yes, yes, wiped out, stamped flat. That is why and – I have lost the ribbon off my pigtail,’ said the younger girl. She looked behind her over the sofa-back.
‘It is not here,’ said the elder. ‘It was lost before. Don’t you remember?’
‘Now, if you are lost, you must go and tell our police. They will take care of you and give you food,’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘Anna will show you the way there.’
‘No,’ – this was the six-year-old with the smile, – ‘we must wait here till our people come for us. Mustn’t we, sister?’
‘Of course. We wait here till our people come for us. All the world knows that,’ said the eldest girl.
‘Yes.’ The boy in her lap had waked again. ‘Little children, too – as little as Henri, and he doesn’t wear trousers yet. As little as all that.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Frau Ebermann, shivering. In spite of the heat of the room and the damp breath of the steam-inhaler, the aspirin was not doing its duty.
The girl raised her blue eyes and looked at the woman for an instant.
‘You see,’ she said emphasising her statements with her fingers, ‘they told us to wait here till our people came for us. So we came. We wait till our people come for us.’
‘That is silly again,’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘It is no good for you to wait here. Do you know what this place is? You have been to school? It is Berlin, the capital of Germany.’
‘Yes, yes,’ they all cried; ‘Berlin, capital of Germany. We know that. That is why we came.
’
‘So, you see, it is no good,’ she said triumphantly, ‘because your people can never come for you here.’
‘They told us to come here and wait till our people came for us.’ They delivered this as if it were a lesson in school. Then they sat still, their hands orderly folded on their laps, smiling as sweetly as ever.
‘Go away! Go away!’ Frau Ebermann shrieked.
‘You called?’ said Anna, entering.
‘No. Go away! Go away!’
‘Very good, old cat,’ said the maid under her breath. ‘Next time you may call,’ and she returned to her friend in the kitchen.
‘I ask you – ask you, please to go away,’ Frau Ebermann pleaded. ‘Go to my Anna through that door, and she will give you cakes and sweeties. It is not kind of you to come in to my room and behave so badly.’
‘Where else shall we go now?’ the elder girl demanded, turning to her little company. They fell into discussion. One preferred the broad street with trees, another the railway station; but when she suggested an Emperor’s palace, they agreed with her.
‘We will go then,’ she said, and added half apologetically to Frau Ebermann, ‘You see, they are so little they like to meet all the others.’
‘What others?’ said Frau Ebermann.
‘The others – hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of the others.’
‘That is a lie. There cannot be a hundred even, much less a thousand,’ cried Frau Ebermann.
‘So?’ said the girl politely.
‘Yes. I tell you; and I have very good information. I know how it happened. You should have been more careful. You should not have run out to see the horses and guns passing. That is how it is done when our troops pass through. My son has written me so.’