With excerpts from Geoffrey Payzant’s “Courage” (2000)
A SOLDIER STANDS AT attention, weeping amid the ruins of bombed-out Bristol, tall in his sailor suit.
He was brave, once, showed courage during the crossing, hardships amidships. Such cold he had never known; the hunger; the adrenaline surge when Action Stations were called, claxons cawing while he raced to his station from the engine room (forbidden territory, but a magnet to him – the steam, the oily reek of moving parts, the throbbing roar of the engines), tumbling up ladders and through closing portals, smashing his watch en route, arriving at his station breathless, utterly without breath. No one noticed.
Now the soldier stands tall in the rubble, a working-class neighbourhood bombed flat. Houses destroyed, suppers interrupted, lullabies cut off mid-verse – the crime being the location, too close to the docks.
Two small boys have long departed, but the sound of their wagon stays with him, will always stay with him, lifelong counterpoint to the roar of ships’ engines.
There approached a rattling and squeaking old wagon with one boy pulling it, by means of a rope, and another boy sitting in it.
Boys in a wagon, outside playing. But not.
They were aged perhaps six or seven years, but in a war zone it is never easy to guess the ages of children.
Maybe they were older. Who knows? The soldier stands aside to let the boys pass.
As they drew nearer I could see that the pulling boy had no eyes and the sitting boy had no legs.
Shore leave, for most soldiers, consists of days and nights spent in noisy pubs, in brothels, drinking themselves senseless, that they might erase such sights. The weeping soldier has no such mechanism. His own shore leaves are spent exploring the shadows of churches, cathedrals, seeking organs of a different type from his comrades, pouring his soul into the keys, the pedals, opening the stops so that Bach and Buxtehude’s fugues may soar from him, cleanse him. The rattle-and-squeak of the wagon changes all that.
He pulls from his gas mask case his last two “nutties,” and the boys thank him solemnly and put the chocolate bars in a safe corner of the wagon. Will they eat the rare sweets? Sell them? Trade? The boys give him no clear answer.
Their main preoccupation was keeping clear of “The Welfare,” people who would take charge of them and separate them so that one could be taken care of in an institution for blinded children, the other in one for crippled children. Of the bombing, of their rescue, of their hospitals and foster homes, the boys would say nothing.
Bit by bit the soldier learns from them of shelters where they might find a meal, a bath, some castoff clothing.
One such shelter was a church basement (all that survived of the church) which the sitting boy pointed out; the rector, they said, was a very kind man who would never betray them to The Welfare.
They spend their days trolling the ruins, fishing for shiny scraps they might sell to a man with a barrow. The sitting boy calls out when something catches his eye, and the pulling boy then feels around for it and adds it to their pile of treasure in the wagon.
The sitting boy did not take up a lot of space.
The boys take their leave and return to work, rattle-and-squeak. The soldier would give them everything he owned, if he could. Instead he stands at attention and salutes them, weeping. His shoulders rise in rhythm to his quiet sobs; soon the front of his sailor suit is soaked with tears. He has never seen such courage.
Boys in a wagon, outside playing. But not.