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My name is actually Bascombe, Frank Bascombe, but Mary Critchley has a slight speech impediment, so I forgave her the mispronunciation. Still, with half the city’s children ru
‘He’s probably out playing with his mates,’ I told her.
‘Not my Joh
I knew. Mr Critchley, Ted to his friends, had been a Royal Navy man since well before the war. He had also been unfortunate enough to serve on the aircraft carrier Courageous, which had been sunk by a German U-boat off the south-west coast of Ireland just three days before. Over five hundred men had been lost, including Ted Critchley. Of course, no body had been found, and probably never would be, so he was only officially ‘missing in action’.
I also knew young Joh
‘Joh
I could understand that well enough – young Joh
‘What do you think I’ve been doing sinsh he didn’t come home at twelve o’clock like he was supposed to? I’ve ashked everyone in the street. Last time he was seen he was down by the canal at about eleven o’clock. Maurice Richards saw him. What can I do, Mr Bashcombe? Firsht Ted, and now… now my Joh
After I had managed to calm her down, I sighed and told her I would look for Joh
It was a glorious day, so warm and su
After the rec, I headed for the derelict houses on Gallipoli Street. The landlord had let them go to rack and ruin two years ago, and they were quite uninhabitable, not even fit for billeting soldiers. They were also dangerous and should have been pulled down, but I think the old skinflint was hoping a bomb would hit them so he could claim insurance or compensation from the government. The doors and windows had been boarded up, but children are resourceful, and it wasn’t difficult even for me to remove a couple of loose sheets of plywood and make my way inside. I wished I had my torch, but I had to make do with what little light slipped through the holes. Every time I moved, my feet stirred up clouds of dust, which did my poor lungs no good at all.
I thought Joh
I searched as best I could in the poor light, and I called out Joh
Nothing.
After three hours of searching the neighbourhood, I’d had no luck at all. Blackout time was seven forty-five p.m., so I still had about an hour and a half left, but if Joh
At half past six, I called on Maurice Richards, grateful for his offer of a cup of tea and the chance to rest my aching feet. Maurice and I went back a long time. We had both survived the first war, Maurice with the loss of an arm, and me with permanent facial scarring and a racking cough that comes and goes, thanks to the mustard gas leaking through my mask at the Third Battle of Ypres. We never talked about the war, but it was there, we both knew, an invisible bond tying us close together while at the same time excluding us from so much other, normal human intercourse. Not many had seen the things we had, and thank God for that.
Maurice lit up a Passing Cloud one-handed, then he poured the tea. The seven o’clock news came on the radio, some rot about us vowing to keep fighting until we’d vanquished the foe. It was still very much a war of words at that time, and the more rhetorical the language sounded, the better the politicians thought they were doing. There had been a couple of minor air skirmishes, and the sinking of the Courageous, of course, but all the action was taking place in Poland, which seemed as remote as the moon to most people. Some clever buggers had already started calling it the ‘Bore War’.
‘Did you hear Tommy Handley last night, Frank?’ Maurice asked.
I shook my head. There’d been a lot of hoopla about Tommy Handley’s new radio programme, It’s That Man Again, or ITMA, as people called it. I was never a fan. Call me a snob, but when evening falls I’m far happier curling up with a good book or an interesting talk on the radio than listening to Tommy Handley.
‘Talk about laugh,’ said Maurice. ‘They had this one sketch about the Ministry of Aggravation and the Office of Twerps. I nearly died.’
I smiled. ‘Not far from the truth,’ I said. There were now so many of these obscure ministries, boards and departments involved in so many absurd pursuits – all for the common good, of course – that I had been thinking of writing a dystopian satire. I proposed to set it in the near future, which would merely be a thinly disguised version of the present. So far, all I had was a great idea for the title: I would reverse the last two numbers in the current year, so instead of 1939, I’d call it 1993. (Well, I thought it was a good idea!)
‘Look, Maurice,’ I said, ‘it’s about young Joh
‘Oh, aye,’ Maurice said. ‘She were round asking about him not long ago. Still not turned up?’
‘No.’
‘Cause for concern, then.’
‘I’m begi
‘Just walking down by the canal, by old Woodruff’s scrapyard.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was he alone?’
Maurice nodded.
‘Did he say anything.’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t say anything to him?’
‘No cause to. He seemed preoccupied, just staring in the water, like, hands in his pockets. I’ve heard what happened to his dad. A lad has to do his grieving.’