Read Online Postcards From No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers - Free Book Online

our cellar, and Mother, Father and I had our hands full tending them. They bore their pain with great fortitude. Except for one poor boy called Sam, who was suffering from what was then called shell shock. One of the medical orderly’s ‘basket cases’. His nerves had completely gone. He crouched in a corner, suffering from terrible bouts of shivering, would sometimes suddenly cry out or burst in to tears with his head held in his hands, but would say nothing and would not allow anyone to comfort him.
    ‘You wanted to be a nurse at the Schoonoord,’ Father teased. ‘Well, you’ve got your wish, only here at home.’ And then he said in English one of the ‘familiar sayings’ we had used for practice in those days before the parachutes fell from the sky, which already seemed a century ago: ‘All things come to he who waits.’
    The soldier I was tending at that moment, hearing this, said, ‘But he who hesitates is lost.’
    To which Father replied, ‘Because time and tide wait for no man.’
    Not to be left out, I said, ‘But a stitch in time saves nine.’
    At which: ‘Come what, come may,’ called out another soldier, ‘time and the hour runs through the roughest day.’
    And another, ‘“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things—”’
    ‘“Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax—”,’ another butted in.
    At which several voices shouted together, ‘“Of cabbages and kings.”’
    Everyone was laughing by now.
    ‘You can fool all the people some of the time,’ someone sang out in a comic voice, ‘you can even fool some of the people all of the time—’ and the others shouted back, ‘But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’
    We were just recovering from the fresh burst of laughter this caused, when someone, flapping a piece of paper in the air, said in a high squeaky voice, ‘Peace in our time!’, which reduced them to such uncontrollable gusts of laughter that some soldiers upstairs heard the noise and came down to see what was going on. So the joke had to be repeated, which caused further gales of merriment. Even though I did not understand why it was so funny, not knowing about Mr Chamberlain and his pact with Hitler at Munich, their laughter infected Papa and me and soon we were holding our sides too.
    ‘What is it, what is it?’ Mother kept asking. ‘What are they saying?’ But neither of us could find the breath to tell her.
    Then, just as we were calming down and blowing our noses and wiping our eyes, a mock-cheerful voice said, ‘Well lads, for sure, life is a bowl of cherries.’ There was a second’s pause before another voice muttered with exaggerated sorrow, ‘But someone’s eaten all mine.’ And this set everyone off in aching laughter again.
    As we were recovering from this I saw poor Sam laughing with us—or I should say that is what I thought he was doing. It was only when he suddenly stared unblinking at me with blazing raw eyes, tears streaming down his cheeks, the skin of his face stretched tight and white over the bones of his skull, that I knew he was not laughing at all but—well, I think wailing would be the right word. Everyone else seemed to become aware of him at the same moment. I was about to go to him when the soldier next to me laid a hand on my arm and shook his head. And then Sam spoke for the first time since he was brought to us, saying in a clear high sing-song voice, ‘I have desired to go where springs not fail, to fields where flies no sharp and sided hail and a few lilies blow. And I have asked to be where no storms come, where the green swell is in the havens dumb, and out of the swing of the sea.’
    *
    How must I know such things, from so long ago and in a language not my own? The old often say they remember their youth more clearly than the day before yesterday. But this is not it. I know these things because those few days and the few weeks that followed them were such an intensity of living, so much