Lord of the Nutcracker Men (2 page)

On the first of October he brought home a box of toy soldiers. They were British Tommies, little soldiers and machine gunners, cast from lead by a German toy maker.

Dad dropped the box on the floor. “You might as well have these, Johnny,” he said. “No one's going to buy them now, and that's
damned
certain.”

He never swore. So my mother gave him a dark look, and he turned very red.

“Well, they're not,” he said. “If it comes from Germany, nobody wants it. No one will touch it, except to smash it. I saw a man go out of his way—clear across Baker Street—to kick at a dachshund a lady was walking.”

“But we
are
at war,” said Mum, trying to console him. “Those little lead soldiers might only be toys to you, but to other men they're something worth fighting about.”

Dad scowled but didn't argue back. He sat in his chair, staring through the window at the buildings and the sky. It was just a few days later when he went off to his shop in the morning, and came home in a uniform. He had joined the British Army.

“They lowered the height!” he cried. “It's five foot five. I'll be a giant among the next batch of men.”

His uniform didn't fit him very well. It drooped around him like a lot of greenish brown sacks, and the funny puttees—wound too many times round his legs— were held in place with his bicycle clips.

I laughed when I saw him like that. But Mum cried. She went at him with a mouthful of pins, tucking him all into shape like one of his little felt dolls. And all the time, as she nipped and tucked, she cried great tears that poured from her without any sound.

Dad softened his voice. “I have to do my bit. We have to lick the Germans.”

He packed his things in a little bag. He sat on the floor and packed a book to read, and his carving set, his paints and inks. Mum smiled when she saw him doing that. She looked terribly sad, but she smiled. Then she bent down and kissed the top of his head.

Dad looked surprised. He gathered the rest of his things in a hurry, then stood up with his little bag. “I won't be gone for long,” he said. “I'll be home in time for Christmas.”

That was ten weeks away; it seemed forever.

“No tears, now,” said Dad. “The time will pass before you know it.” He hugged me. “I'll see you at Christmas.”

He said the same thing at the railway station, and he shouted it from a window as the train started down the
track. “Bye-bye, Johnny,” he said. “See you at Christmas.” A thousand men leaned from the windows, every one dressed in khaki, all waving their arms. They looked like a forest sliding down the platform, drawing away in blasts of steam. They left us all behind, a crowd of children and women and old, gray men. The platform was littered with rose petals.

We waved; we cheered and shouted until the train clattered across a point and the last carriage slipped around the bend. Then there was a silence that made the air seem thick and heavy. Nobody wanted to leave, but no one would look at anybody else. My mother covered her mouth with her handkerchief, took my hand, and pulled me away.

I named my soldier Pierre Six. I had five Frenchmen already, and didn't know any other names. I put him into action with the other Pierres and the metal Tommies, battling the nutcracker men at the edge of the carpet. I called it the banks of the Aisne.

The Western Front was now a line of trenches that stretched from the Channel to the Swiss frontier. My dad had been gone for less than three weeks, but it seemed like forever. In all my life, before the war, I'd never spent as much as a day without him.

I rushed my nutcracker men across the parlor carpet.“Ratta-tatta-tatta!” I shouted as the Tommies opened fire. I screamed for the nutcracker men as they spun and fell.

“Aarrgh!”
shouted Fatty Dienst. He started crawling, and I gasped his voice. “I must keep going. I must fight on for Chermany.”

“Johnny!” said my mother.

I looked up at her in the doorway. She'd brought in the Browns from the flat downstairs, and they peered past her at my battlefield.

“If you have to play those games, please play them in your room,” she said.

“But Fritz is on the run,” I told her.

Mr. Brown laughed. He came through the door, then tugged up his trousers and squatted beside me. He was round as a football, with a round, pink head and little round spectacles. He picked up Pierre Three. “Cor,” he said, like a schoolboy. “It looks quite alive.” He swiveled on his heels and held the soldier toward my mum and Mrs. Brown. “Look. There's laces in his boots. It's remarkable.”

Mr. Brown put the Frenchman on the carpet, then
rushed him at Fatty Dienst. The little German toppled over again.
“Mein Gott!”
gasped Mr. Brown. “
Gott in Himmel,
I'm done for.”

“Honestly!” cried Mrs. Brown. “Maybe you should both go and play in Johnny's room.”

I wouldn't have minded that, but Mum sent me out instead. “Go on,” she said. “It's a gorgeous day.”

I was glad the war was on. It made London an exciting place, with something new nearly every day. Rings of sandbags appeared in Regent's Park as suddenly and mysteriously as fairy rings. Guns popped up inside them; then soldiers appeared, as though from nowhere. Laborers arrived with lorries full of pipe and wire, and they laid a line of lampposts through the middle of the park.

I thought it was a mistake, but the soldiers said the lamps were going to fool the Kaiser when he sent his zeppelins over London. “From up there it will look like the busiest street in the city,” they said. “The zepps will aim for that, and all they'll hit is grass.”

The zeppelins were longer than the highest building in London, the soldiers told me. They would glide across the sky like dreadnoughts on a sea of stars.

“What will they do up there?” I asked.

“Burn,” the soldiers said, and laughed. Their guns had only three or four shells each—one had none at all— but that didn't bother them. “We'll light the zepps up like fireworks. Bloody big bags of gas, that's all that zepps are, Johnny.”

I was watching with Mum at the window when the lamps came on for the first time. I laughed to see a street that wasn't there; it was such a grand joke to play on the Kaiser. All around the park, the trams and carts and
motorcars clattered along in a fudgy gloom because only half of the
real
lights were lit.

“I hope a zepp comes tonight,” I said.

“A
zepp,
” she scoffed. “Why on earth do you wish for that?”

“Because we can watch it from here,” I said. “We live right beside the target.”

She looked at the lights, then up at the sky. “Oh, Johnny,” she whispered.

I could tell she was scared by the way her fingertips touched her lips, then trickled like water down her chin. I could
feel
that she was scared, and I tried to laugh, because adults weren't supposed to be scared.

“Don't worry, Mum,” I told her. “The zepps will burn like fireworks. They're just bloody big bags—”

“Johnny!” she said.

“Of gas! That's all they are.

““Where are you learning to talk like this?” she asked. #x201C;What's happening to you, Johnny?”

She swept the curtains shut, then pulled me from the window. “I don't like it,” she said. “All your army games, you and your chums running around with sticks for guns, everyone getting shot and killed.”

“We don't really get killed,” I told her.

“It's a wonder,” said Mum. “It's a miracle you haven't taken out somebody's eye.” She wrung her hands together. “It's too much, Johnny.”

She ran into the kitchen. I heard a splash of water, and when she came back, her face was wet and bright from scrubbing. Her eyes were very red. “Johnny,” she said. “Do you remember your Auntie Ivy?”

“Prickly Ivy?” I asked.

A little twitch started at her mouth, but she was too serious to smile. “She's your father's sister,” she said. “I don't think he'd be happy to hear that from you.”

She took my hands and sat again, holding me in front of her. “Your auntie lives in Cliffe. Out in the country. You could go and stay with her for a while. Just until Christmas, of course. Just until the war is over.” She stared into my eyes. “How would you like that, Johnny?”

“Not much,” I said.

But it didn't matter what I thought. Mum sent off some letters and a telegram, and before I knew it I was on my way to Cliffe. I spent a sad day going around the streets and through the park, saying goodbye to my friends and the soldiers at the guns. I said goodbye to the animals in the zoo, to the squirrels and the rabbits that came and gathered around me, as they'd always done. I patted Black Charlie, the ragman's huge horse, and fed him one last piece of barley sugar.

Then my mum packed my clothes, and I packed my soldiers, my beautiful nutcracker men, all my Pierres, and my little army of metal Tommies. We walked through the city, over London Bridge to Victoria Station. It was the same route that Siegfried had taken, and I was frightened that people would think we were German, that they would shout at us and drive us along.

“Should we sing ‘God Save the King’?” I asked.

“I don't feel like singing,” said Mum.

We walked very slowly, stopping to watch a dustman empty the bins, and again to see a chimney sweep's brush poke up from somebody's flue in a cloud of black soot. Mum talked about Cliffe, and how she and my dad had met on the train.

“I was working at Woolwich,” she said. “At the arsenal. One day I got on the train to go into London, and I sat beside a handsome man. The nicest man.”

“My dad?” I asked.

“That's right.”

I switched hands on my suitcase. “How did you know that he was my dad?”

“Well, he wasn't then. Not yet,” she said. “I was certain he was a barrister or something. He looked so important, with his little briefcase on his lap. What a shock I got when he opened it. There were puppets in there, and he made them sit up and talk to me.”

We were both laughing when we came to the station. I had forgotten how sad I was, until Mum left me at the platform gates and went to buy my ticket. She had to push through a crowd to get there, then push her way back. She knelt in front of me. “You look so grown up,” she said. “Such a little man.”

She straightened my tie, smiling and crying at the same time. People were passing us, queuing up at the gate where the man punched their tickets. I could hear steam hissing from the train on the platform.

“Now, listen,” said Mum. “You'll pass Beckley Hill and Buckland Farm, and the next stop will be Cliffe. Your Auntie Ivy will meet you at the station.”

The train whistled. I heard the clicking of the man's ticket puncher. Someone cried, “All aboard!”

“Go,” said Mum. She hugged me and kissed me. “You'd better go.”

I picked up my suitcase and dragged the other one. The man took my ticket. “Hurry, son,” he said.

Mum was standing on her toes, her arm reaching. “Johnny, I love you,” she shouted, and the crowd closed between us. Compartment doors were slamming shut up and down the train. A fat man all in black crashed against me. A lady knocked a suitcase from my hand. “Mum!” I said.

A Highlander in his kilt and green stockings picked up my suitcase. He took the other one from me—both in one arm—and clamped a huge fist on my shoulder. “You poor laddie,” he shouted. “Don't you fret. I'll see you settled, all right.”

The train shrieked and puffed. It jerked forward with a bang of couplers. The Highlander pulled me with him, in through the door of the nearest compartment. The train jolted again, and we fell together onto the seat. Someone reached past me and closed the door, and the train steamed out of the station.

The compartment was barely half full. Only six people sat on the benches that stretched across the width of the train. The Highlander bent down and lifted my suitcases onto the seat. He pretended to groan at their weight. “Och, what have you got in there?” he asked in his great, loud voice.

I showed him all my soldiers. When he saw the Pierres he winked. “Their feet are on backwards,” he said.

“They're not,” I told him.

“But the Frenchies never go frontwards,” he roared, winking furiously.

There was something odd about him. He sat for a while, glowering through the window, then suddenly shouted again. “Where did you get the wee soldiers?”

“From my father,” I said.

“Eh? Your father?” His face pulsed with a violent twitch. “You're on your way to see him?”

“No,” I said. “He's in the army. He's going to France.”

“Eh?”

He was deaf as a post. I shouted back, “He's going to the front!”

“Is he?” shouted the Highlander.

“Yes. I won't see him until Christmas.

” “Don't you believe it,” the Highlander bellowed. “You won't see him for years to come.”

The other people in the compartment were tilted toward us, frowning as they listened. The Highlander kept winking in his ghastly way. I didn't think he even knew he was doing it.

“We'll never win this war,” he said. “It can't be done.

” An angry man, the fat one all in black, told him not to talk such rubbish. The Highlander whirled toward him, twitching horribly. “I was there,” he said, even more loudly. “I watched the Frenchies streaming past and saw the Huns come thick as eels, squirming over the mud and the ground, all their guns ablazing.” He winked and shouted. “I was there at Loos, in a field of corpses. We marched shoulder to shoulder against the Germans, until they got so sick of killing us that they turned their guns aside.”