WALTER'S WARS

Sad, but there's no such thing as immortality

Walter Angel had seen and done most things in his eighty-nine years.

He’d been a teenager, in the second world war when the house next door had taken a direct hit and the shock had sent him hurtling down the stairs in his own home, to break his leg in two places.

Now night was falling. A long night without a dawn: he knew that like he’d always known that nobody was immortal. His heart was struggling and even though he was being cared for by a fragrant troupe of nurses as he lay in his hospital bed, he knew the sun would never rise again, at least not for him.

He’d seen it rise that far off day on a camping holiday with his school, as a twelve year-old who discovered for the very first time that girls were one hell of a lot more than pigtails and navy blue knickers. Not that he’d done anything about it. They’d pranced around, tumbling and doing handstands with their skirts or frocks tucked into those knickers, and they’d smiled.

They’d been happy, and their contagious happiness had spread like sunlight in the dawn to rest on him, and made him smile.

He didn’t want to die. He wanted to go back to that first holiday away from his parents and lie on his sleeping bag, head stuck out of the tent flap, and soak up all that happiness. The lasses giggling, squealing, laughing.

That was what life had been all about until the war came along to cast its shadow on all that boundless joy.

He felt his heart give a tiny lurch. Was it memory that did that, or a fool’s hope for another dawn, or the sound, like agony seared into his mind, of the bombs falling?

He closed his eyes.

Maybe, he thought, this will be the last time I reach through the fading day for a night’s sleep.

He’d not done much reaching through the night for anything as vague as sleep on that first night of his honeymoon when he’d married Rosie who turned out, as he’d hoped she would, to be the love of his entire life.

With the war a recent but spookily an almost forgotten thing, he’d turned to her as she lay in the bed next to him, nervous like brides once were, and told her not to be scared.

“What have I got to be scared of, Walter Angel?” she had asked, and he knew there was nothing he could do that would frighten her.

“Why, nothing Mrs Angel,” he had replied. And that had been right, surely? She’d had nothing to fear, not from him, though she scared the living daylights out of him that first time she’d breathed don’t stop as if he might have dreamed of doing anything of the kind. Stopping, that is. He would never stop loving her. He knew that, and he hadn’t.

But he had been obliged to do National Service a couple of years earlier, and been shown a thing or two.

Like how to clean and maintain a gun, how to aim it, how to seek a beating heart, pull the trigger and still that heart. All pretence, of course, all man shapes on plywood, but they represented real beating hearts…

Like his was still beating. Just about, but worn enough to do anything, even stop.

Back then he’d learned that killing was evil. All killing, wartime and peace time.

Janie had come along a year or so after he’d quelled Rosie’s non-existent fears, and there never had been a joy like Rosie, and then Edward who followed her when she’d been toddling, though he’d always been called Teddy right back to the start of his being.

He couldn’t help, as he lay there seeking for one last sleep, opening his eyes again as if Teddy or Rosie or both of them might toddle into view…

“I love you, daddy...”

The sound was there in his head, the words and their truth, and he thought a tear might fall from his eyes and roll down his cheek, and if one did, what would Nurse Plunket make of it?

“And I love you too,” he whispered for the very last time to those thundering silent words, though he didn’t know it was the last time. He guessed, of course, but what kind of man guesses his own death unless he’s driven by too many years of blasted hope? And he hadn’t, had he?

Though he had hoped, when it was first mooted, that there’d be no more wars like the one that had broken his schoolboy leg. Even now he hoped that and had been a verbose supporter of Mr Churchill and his hope that one day the countries of Europe would see a bit of sense. Two world wars in half a century had cost so much, in lives, in hopes, in dreams, in weeping mothers and grief-stricken wives. And there had been other bloody wars stretching back into history.

He struggled to shift a black memory. There’d been violence the day that Rosie died. A bomb, on the home land and intended to kill the then Prime Minister, had been all over the news, but he’d ignored it because Rosie, dear Rosie, lovely and still too young to die, Rosie, was dying. Bloody cancer! It stole her like a thief in the night, and broke his heart.

But that bomb had exploded, and it didn’t matter one flying cuss to him. How could it?

He’d listened to the preacher who had never spoken to Rosie or even been aware of her life, they hadn’t been church going, but in her death he was trying to sound as if he was familiar with her little ways. In a way he hated the man for his artifice. Only he had known Rosie, He and the kids who weren’t kids any more.

But one of his dreams had been forged into a robust hope when Europe, the fire in which most wars for a thousand years had been forged, and where too many young men’s remains were scattered like autumn leaves on the breeze, started drawing together, uniting, using trade and freedom as a route to peace.

Another tear trickled down his face when he realised it was all ending with the forces that had created conflict when he was born rising again, the thugs who had fermented hatred and caused his leg to be broken like legs shouldn’t be dominating the news, even becoming…

English Hitlers, he breathed, so silent it couldn't be heard outside his own head, English bloody Hitlers in Downing Street...

“Are you all right, Mr Angel?” asked sweet and lovely voice. It was the nurse, Nurse Plunket, and she’d spotted the tears in his eyes.

And they were there because, like the shadow of an old memory or the whisper of a false hope, he sensed he could hear the thud, thud thug of marching feet as the jackboots clomped towards him.

But it was only his heart, beating its own retreat. There would be no dawn, no shining sun to greet a new day.

Nurse Plunket closed his eyes for him, because he couldn’t.

“Goodbye, Walter,” she whispered…

© Peter Rogerson 08.10.19