Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [14]
Half a mile beyond the elm, the lane cut through Skeyton Woods. And eventually, fearfully, she led him into the trees.
And then he was gone. For two afternoons, Ruth pedaled slowly beneath the spread of the elm, then waited by the rotting five-bar gate that opened into the wood. On the first of these afternoons, when it became clear to her that he was not going to come, she felt something that might have been relief. On the second, she filled with hurt and was astonished to find herself, for the first time since early childhood, crying.
The following Tuesday morning, she found an envelope on her desk. It was addressed to MISS R. LITTLE, C/O CUBITT AND LARK, THE SQUARE, BORSTEAD, NORFOLK.
She looked at it, alarmed, as though it were something ominous or sinister: a spider on a slice of cake, perhaps. She had never in her life received a letter. When she found the courage to pick it up, it felt fragile. The paper was thin; she could almost read the writing through the envelope. (She worried that somebody might already have done so.)
The handwriting was fussy and tilted, almost italic.
Dear Ruth,
I expect youll be wondering where I got to. I hope so anyway! Well I got a posting with only 10 hrs notice. I hoped to see you but I could not get away. I can not tell you where I’m going for obvious reasons. (EG I would get shot!) I will think about you Ruth and I think you know what I mean (!) As you know I am a city boy born and bred but from now on I will think of trees and country side etc in a new way.
I dont know when I’ll be back but I will be back. We have not known each other long Ruth but if your so inclined I ask you to wait for me. When I come back I will come down there and ask you a very serious question. I think you know what that question is.
I will think of you Ruth as I say. I hope you will think of me too.
Go careful on that bike!
Yours sincerely,
George (Ackroyd)
HE WAS ONLY a couple of months older than her. (She thought it was more than that. She considered herself a girl and him a man.)
He was born in Sheffield, the eldest of four children. He left school at the age of fourteen, in 1932. It was not a good time. Unemployment was rife. Men waited at factory gates on the off chance of a day’s work. With his mates, George went on the cadge: gleaning spilled coal, running betting slips, a bit of petty theft. The pressure was on him, though. His younger siblings were waiting for his clothes and his bed.
A week after his uncelebrated fifteenth birthday, he joined the army. He went from short trousers into full uniform. He signed up for fifteen years.
He was sent for basic training to Catterick, where he showed some aptitude for mechanics — inherited, perhaps, from his father, who had been a lathe operator — and was attached as a trainee fitter to the Royal Engineers.
He had five good years, learning his trade, and how to drink, in postings up and down the country. He once, years later, spoke fondly to Clem of an army-versus-civvy mass punch-up in Yeovil, Somerset, in 1937.
He was genuinely astonished by the war; he hadn’t been paying attention. Hitler had been a sort of joke in the newspapers and newsreels. Then everything got insanely hectic, and he found himself in France, a corporal, meaninglessly bossing people around and being slapped on the back by elderly Frenchmen. On May 30, 1940, he lost control of his bowels on the beach at Dunkirk when German dive-bombers howled down and sand admixed with body parts exploded all around him. He was ashamed, so when he’d blundered into the sea, he struggled out of his soiled pants and trousers before being hauled, bare-arsed and half drowned — he was a poor swimmer — into a gaily painted launch from the Isle of Wight called