‘D-Da . . . L-look, I’ve made you a whistle . . . to train Soldier . . .’
Da didn’t turn at his son’s voice. Stanley raised an uncertain hand to his lips to blow. The notes bubbled a clear and bright and haunting fountain. Soldier’s ears pricked. Stanley blew again. Soldier cocked his head, then capered away to Rocket at the edge of the lake. It was a good whistle, Stanley was thinking, he’d cut it well. He stepped forward, smiling, holding out the whistle – then froze in Da’s sudden, arctic glare.
‘I’ll drown it. Mark me, I’ll drown it.’
Stanley’s heart thumped a tattoo. Da was stooping, fingering a stone. Stanley leaped towards Soldier. Da hurled the stone. It landed inches from Soldier in the shallows of the lake. Confounded with rage and disbelief, Stanley whirled around to his Da. Throw a stone at a puppy? His own father? Then he could do it, would do it: would drown Soldier.
Da stomped away. Stanley turned back to Soldier and saw him, innocent and small and light against the deep, black water. In a vortex of horror and nausea, Stanley imagined a slender bubble rise on the surface of the lake, and another, and another – and a weighted sack dropping through dark water.
The twilight deepened. Still holding the rabbits, Stanley made his way to the game larder. When he’d skinned them, he turned to wash his bloodied hands. To the left of the sink, on the tiled wall above, hung a small mirror. Stanley was surprised by his reflection – did he really look so young? He leaned into the murky glass. A minute passed as he studied himself. His hair was too long and it flopped over his forehead. He straightened up. He was fourteen, but he was tall, taller almost than Tom. If he lifted his chin, squared his shoulders, could he look fifteen? Sixteen? Seventeen? What was the difference between a fourteen- and a seventeen-year-old face? Stanley rubbed his chin. A beard would help. If he looked older, he could enlist.
Also reflected in the glass were Tom’s cap and coat, hanging on a nail. On an impulse, Stanley turned, crossed the room, unhooked them. He put on the cap and turned to the glass, pushing his hair off his face. Looking at himself from all sides, he tried the coat. The length of the sleeves was good, but it was broad across the chest. Stanley buttoned it and rubbed the dust from the glass with his cuff. That was better.
It wasn’t easy, he thought, to tell what sort of age he was now. Anyway, all sorts of men had signed up. Shepherd, the old History teacher, had been too short in 1914, but then he’d been tall enough by 1916. Lara Bird’s father was almost an old man but they’d taken him too. Recruitment officers were given a sixpence for every man they signed up – that’s why they’d signed them up, because of the sixpence probably. Stanley stood to attention, clicked his heels and saluted, fingers to the edge of Tom’s cap.
‘Seventeen, sir.’
Soldier leaped to his side and Stanley looked at him, distraught, realizing – you couldn’t join the Army with a puppy. He couldn’t join Tom.
No, he couldn’t do that . . . but he and Soldier must leave at first light and take their chances together.
Early the next morning
Lancashire
A howl split the dawn. Stanley sprang out of bed and yanked the curtains open.
The coach-house doors were open, the trap gone. What was Da doing up so early? Tethered to the bars of the kennel was Rocket, her long neck outstretched. Her howls circled upward, haunting the thin air. The glistening cobbles reflected the shivering sky.
‘I’ll drown it. Mark me, I’ll drown it.’
Da’s words were icy and precise in Stanley’s head. A lightning surge of anger shot from his scalp to his fingertips. Fool, fool, fool! He should never have left Soldier alone, not for one minute; he should have slept in the stable, keeping guard.
Stanley hurled himself, missing, stumbling down, the stairs, and charged into the yard. He flung the kennel gate open, slamming it against the stone wall. Scattered, broken straws were brown and sodden, trampled into the wooden boards, the hessian bedding gone – Da had taken the sack.
Rocket hurled out a primeval yowl, which juddered against the streaming buildings, and twisted the pit of Stanley’s belly.
‘I’ll drown it. Mark me, I’ll drown it.’
He choked and gagged. The tiny dog with the oatmeal coat and whirring tail. Stanley ran barefoot, maddened, blistering. He saw a golden straw on the ground – straw from Soldier’s bedding – and clutched it up. Following straws, he raced along Park Drive, stopping to grasp at them. On he ran, snatching at clues, a child on a sinister, demented treasure hunt. There – there were wheel marks tracking the mud. Stanley followed them, knowing where they’d lead.
At the far end of the lake stood the trap. There was Trumpet and there was Da – he’d seen Stanley, was leaping into the trap, lashing the old cob into a canter from a standing start. The trap disappeared into the dark spruce. Stanley ran screaming to the trap, running, still screaming, his feet bleeding. He heard the lash of a whip, Da’s shout as he urged Trumpet on. Stanley stopped on the flattened grass where the trap had pulled up at the water’s edge. Nauseous with horror, he moved slowly towards the edge of the lake, inching his eyes up from the trampled reeds to the stone ledge where the water was deepest. This was where he’d seen Da so often. Hour after hour, Da came and stood here; here, where the water was blackest, he’d chosen to drown the tiny Soldier. The surface was blank. Not a ripple. Stanley retched and turned and ran, howling, to the cottage.
Back in the yard, Stanley knelt by Rocket. He saw the rope that tethered her. Da might tether his dog but he couldn’t tether his son. Stanley would leave, could never live with Da again, never pass that lake again. He put his cheek to Rocket’s flawless coat and fingered her silky ears.
‘Stay with Da. He does love you . . .’
Stanley yanked Tom’s best coat and cap from the hook by the door and stuffed the postcard of the collie into his pocket. He slipped one of the reed whistles into a Bryant & May matchbox and that too he put in his pocket, flinging the second on to Da’s red chair.
He emptied the tin of kitchen money, ripped a sheet of paper from his Grammar exercise book and wrote:
At the door, one hand in his pocket, Stanley stopped to look one last time at the room. He saw the whistle on the chair. Da would see the whistle his son had made him, might see in it all the love and hope he’d destroyed. The whistle in the matchbox – that one he’d keep himself, forever, in memory of Soldier.
PART II
Early afternoon, the same day
Liverpool
The bus pulled up in Queen Square. This was the last stop. Stanley was forty miles from home, forty miles from Da. Full of purpose, he stepped down. He’d enlist. There was no Soldier. There was nothing to hold him back. He’d join the Army, and he’d do it today. Trams and taxicabs trundled past. A huge poster – at least seven yards long – covered the side of a passing tram, presenting the silhouette of a muscular arm and a clenched fist, under it the words, ‘LEND YOUR STRONG RIGHT ARM TO YOUR COUNTRY. ENLIST NOW’.
Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, had asked for ‘Men, and still more men until the enemy is crushed’. The Army was desperately short, and if it could take half the old folk in Longridge it could take him.
The crowd grew tighter, more concentrated. People were standing about, just waiting. Stanley stopped, glimpsing a vivid image over the heads of the crowd: an artillery team dashing into action under heavy fire. Other posters were plastered to the windows of the imposing building. In one, above the words ‘ENLIST TODAY’, a soldier wore the laurel wreath and sphinx and red rose of the East Lancashires. Tom’s regiment. A queue had formed in front of the building: a motley bunch, all shapes, sizes, heights, ages, and all at odds with the tall, fit figures in the posters. It was getting late, but if the queue kept moving, Stanley would be seen today.