Read Online A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor - Free Book Online

of it, ready for burning, were dummies of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince. The Kaiser wore a real German spiked-helmet and a cloth mask with huge whiskers; Little Willy was equipped with a cardboard monocle and a busby made of a hearthrug, and both had real German boots. Everyone lay on the grass, singing It’s a long, long trail a-winding, The only girl in the world and Keep the home fires burning ; then, Good-byee, don’t cryee , and K-K-K-Katie . We were waiting till it was dark enough to light the bonfire. (An irrelevant remembered detail: when it was almost dark, a man called Thatcher Brown said “Half a mo!” and, putting a ladder against the stack, he climbed up and pulled off the boots, leaving tufts of straw bursting out below the knees. There were protestations: “Too good to waste,” he said.) At last someone set fire to the dry furze at the bottom and up went the flames in a great blaze. Everyone joined hands and dancedround it, singing Mademoiselle from Armentières and Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag . The whole field was lit up and when the flames reached the two dummies, irregular volleys of bangs and cracks broke out; they must have been stuffed with fireworks. Squibs and stars showered into the night. Everyone clapped and cheered, shouting: “There goes Kaiser Bill!” For the children there, hoisted on shoulders like me, it was a moment of ecstasy and terror. Lit by the flames, the figures of the halted dancers threw concentric spokes of shadow across the grass. The two dummies above were beginning to collapse like ghostly scarecrows of red ash. Shouting, waving sparklers and throwing fire-crackers, boys were running in and out of the ring of gazers when the delighted shrieks changed to a new key. Screams broke out, then cries for help. Everyone swarmed to a single spot, and looked down. Margaret joined them, then rushed back. She put her hands over my eyes, and we started running. When we were a little way off, she hoisted me piggy-back, saying “ Don’t look back! ” She raced on across the dark fields and between the ricks and over the stiles as fast as she could run. But I did look back for a moment, all the same; the abandoned bonfire lit up the crowd which had assembled under the willows. Everything, somehow, spelt disaster and mishap. When we got home, she rushed upstairs, undressed me and put me into her bed and slipped in, hugging me to her flannel nightdress, sobbing and shuddering and refusing to answer questions. It was only after an endless siege that she told me, days later, what had happened. One of the village boys had been dancing about on the grass with his head back and a Roman candle in his mouth. The firework had slipped through his teeth and down his throat. They rushed him in agony,—“spitting stars,” they said—down to the brook. But it was too late...
    It was a lurid start. A bit later, Margaret took me to watch trucks full of departing German prisoners go by; then to see The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse , which left a confused impression of exploding shells, bodies on barbed wire, and a Prussian officers’ orgy in a chateau. Much later on, old copies of Punch and QueenMary’s Gift Book and albums of war-time cartoons abetted the sinister mystique with a new set of stage properties: atrocity stories, farmhouses on fire, French cathedrals in ruins, Zeppelins and the goose-step; uhlans galloping through the autumn woods, Death’s Head Hussars, corsetted officers with Iron Crosses and fencing slashes, monocles and staccato laughs...(How different from our own carefree subalterns in similar illustrations! Fox-terriers and Fox’s puttees and Anzora hair-cream and Abdullah cigarettes; and Old Bill lighting his pipe under the starshells!) The German military figures had a certain terrifying glamour, but not the civilians. The bristling paterfamilias, his tightly-buttoned wife, the priggish spectacled